


brick by brick

by sunbrights



Category: Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Codependency, Consent Issues, F/M, POV Alternating, Past Abuse, Post-Canon, Power Imbalance, Recovery, Trauma, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-10
Updated: 2018-01-24
Packaged: 2018-12-25 22:06:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 30,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12045243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunbrights/pseuds/sunbrights
Summary: They meet again, after the Neo World Program has torn them to their foundations: hope, despair, and the yawning debt of their history, waiting to be answered. It's up to them to rebuild, from the ground up, no matter how difficult the work or unfamiliar the tools.No one can lay the mortar of your recovery but yourself.





	1. Chapter 1

He’s there when she wakes up. 

It’s not on accident. Mioda and Hanamura were both up before her, so when the neurological readings from her pod start to spike, Hinata is able to plot out the trajectory of her initial recovery with clinical, precise timing. When they’re six hours out, he puts her on a stopwatch, down to the second.

By then it’s a given that she’ll come out of the pod. The process of waking her up started already, weeks ago, when the cocktail of anesthetics keeping her body in low-energy stasis started reducing its doses. The last six hours are about making sure she has a self to wake up to, and the physical capacity to do it: calibrating oxygen levels and applying electrical stimulation and initiating the final upload from Hinata’s program.

(He’d made Hinata explain to him how it worked, after Mioda. He spent days memorizing the simplest, dumbed-down version Hinata could give him, so that he’d be ready for today.)

They wait in the simulation room together, all seven of them. It’s a thing now, this being the third one. It’s less like a party and more like a ritual, but Hanamura brings snacks anyway. Fuyuhiko doesn’t find time to eat them, between his pacing.

He and Hinata are the only ones allowed to go near the pod, so that she isn’t overwhelmed when she wakes up. He catches himself leaning over to stare at her through the frosted glass of the lid more than once. Maybe at one moment her skin looks warmer. Maybe at another her eyes move more rapidly under their lids. 

It doesn’t matter. No amount of watching or not watching changes Hinata’s projection. The stopwatch beeps, and Hinata stands up from his computer. The row of lights at the top of her pod all turn green.

Fuyuhiko freezes, halfway through his loop around the room. He thought maybe he’d feel like he was going to throw up, but instead his stomach just feels cold, straight to the bottom.

Hinata looks at him. “Are you ready, Kuzuryuu?”

He doesn’t answer, because it doesn’t matter if he is or isn’t. The others gather up their food and books and games, and spread out along the outer edges of the room to give them space.

The pod hisses, and the lid unlatches. He and Hinata lift it from either side, and she’s just... there. There’s nothing elegant or uplifting about it. Her hair is limp and tangled. Her skin is almost translucent, stretched over bone. She looks even worse in the raw light of the fluorescent bulbs above them.

The fanciful part of his brain had been thinking of it like a cocoon, or some kind of sci-fi cryo pod, but it really is like a coffin. She’s really like a corpse, rising from the dead.

(But she is _alive._ )

Her chest expands, her eyes open, and suddenly there isn’t enough air in the room. 

“Kuzuryuu.”

Hinata is staring at him. He’s always fucking doing that these days, _staring,_ like the rest of them don’t notice. 

Fuyuhiko presses his weight down onto the edge of the open pod, until it pinches the skin of his palms. He tries. He opens his mouth. He owes this to her, to be the thing that ties her back down to reality.

He can’t.

“Pekoyama,” Hinata says for him. “Can you hear me?”

It’s like her eyes are swimming in her head. They swing unsteadily from Hinata’s face, to his, and back again. There’s no recognition in it. When her lips move, no sound comes out. Her fingers find the edge of the pod, and curl in against the metallic lip.

“Pekoyama,” Hinata says again. “Do you know where you are?”

Fuyuhiko feels the moment she panics, before she’s coordinated enough to express it. Her answer to Hinata’s question is _no._ She’s constricted in a small space. She’s surrounded by people she doesn’t recognize. She doesn’t have an obvious exit or a readily-available weapon. 

He elbows Hinata out of the way, so it’s only him bent over the pod when it happens. Her arms lock against the sides, her breathing turns erratic, her eyes go wide and trembling, and he finds his words. “Peko. Look, it’s okay, I—” 

She lunges at him. She leverages herself up by twisting her hands in his collar, and he nearly bangs his head on the open lid. She finds some purchase against the bottom of the pod, but she’s not ready to be upright; her eyes unfocus, her balance sways, and they tumble out of it together, his shoulder hitting the floor at a painful angle. 

She’s on top of him, by the time his head’s done spinning. She’s half trying to pin him, and half just trying to keep herself oriented, which translates to a flimsy grip at the front of his shirt. There are scattered shouts and a frenzy of movement behind them. Hinata barks something at Owari.

“Back off!” Fuyuhiko shouts. “I got it! It’s fine! Don’t take a single fucking step!”

Peko’s been in the pod so long that her muscles are weak and seized up; her element of surprise doesn’t count for much. It’s too easy to flip her, to grab her by both wrists and pin her to the floor.

“Hey!” He struggles to control his volume. His voice bounces around the shitty acoustics of the building. “Peko! Listen to me. You gotta chill out, okay? It’s just friends here. It’s just—” 

She thrashes. She fights. She does everything in her power to break his grip and doesn’t even come close. Her muscles strain like threads under his fingertips, and for a blind second he wonders if it’s possible they might snap, under too much stress.

He listens to his own voice crack. “It’s just me.”

Her gaze finds his face and hangs there. The fight drains out of her in inches, until even her neck goes loose, and the back of her head hits the floor with a hollow sound. When he lets her go, she leaves her arms where they are, limp and splayed out. Her eyes are wet. Her next breath is a gasp.

He cups her face in both hands, and bows his forehead against hers. “It’s okay,” he whispers, throat scratchy. “I- I know. It’s okay.”

It isn’t. In the end, no amount of coaxing gets through to her; Owari has to help him pick her up off the floor. She hangs off the both of them, loose-limbed and heavy, like she isn’t trying to hold herself up, like she doesn’t even want to.

*

She apologizes for it later, after they’ve bundled her into a hospital bed and she’s had time to sink back into herself. “Forgive me, young master,” she says. She doesn’t look at him. “I was having trouble… focusing.”

He had a plan, for this moment. He made a bullet point list of the things he wanted to say, since he knew he wouldn’t be able to remember a full speech. In that plan, though, he’d done a better job of getting her here than he’s done so far. 

As it stands, “It’s fine,” and, “Please don’t call me that,” are about as much as he can manage.

She smooths the wrinkles out of the bedsheets with her palm. She hates it, the bed. She wouldn’t bother fidgeting with it otherwise. It almost swallows her, as thin as she is. The pale blue of the hospital gown washes out her skin. 

(But she is _alive._ )

She doesn’t answer, at first. He doesn’t expect her to. It’s been her MO since they were kids and he first heard the title come out of her mouth: she can’t say no to something he wants, so she ignores him until he either forgets or gets tired of asking. 

It’s nearly fifteen minutes later before she finally says, “Yes.” The sound of her voice startles him, like someone snapped a rubber band against his wrist.

He opens his mouth to say _good_ or _great_ or _thank you,_ and then he closes it again. He bites down on the inside of his cheek until it stings. Barely a few hours in and he’s already back to making assumptions about what she wants and how she feels.

He tries again: “Yes, you’ll stop?”

She looks at the window. Not out of it; her gaze is too short for that, and it isn’t like there’s much to look at, anymore. There are smears of hard water spots on the glass.

“I think,” she starts, then stops. The answer to his question seems to get swallowed by the thick of her thoughts. “There’s still more I need to understand.”

“About what?”

Her eyes slide over. It’s the first time she’s looked directly at him since they brought her to the hospital. She looks intense and exhausted at once. “You.”

“We got nothing but time now,” he tells her. It’s not strictly true. “So, whatever we gotta figure out… We’ll figure it out. Okay?”

She nods. She doesn’t say anything else.

He wants to take her hand where it’s lying loose on the bedspread next to her. It’s the only thing he can think of to give her some kind of comfort or steady ground, but there’s a purpling spot starting to curl around the inside of her wrist that he can’t take his eyes off of. He isn’t sure if it’s because her body’s still so fragile, or because he let himself go too far when he grabbed her, or both.

He keeps his hands to himself.

*

The pain gets worse. It slows her rehab down so much that Sonia starts to worry Peko’s room at the hospital might not be free before someone else wakes up from the system. It’s something she’s careful not to say to his face, not that it matters. Sentiments spread.

He tries everything he can think of to make Peko more comfortable: pillows and painkillers and hot and cold compresses. Nothing helps. She never tells him so, only thanks him in a small voice and rests her head back against the pillows, but the line across her forehead never eases.

Hinata tells him that she’s having more difficulty decoupling herself from the nocebo effects of the system than average. Phantom pain, from hundreds of phantom wounds.

“I understand what you’re saying,” Fuyuhiko answers. “But what does that _mean?_ ”

Hinata looks at him over the edge of his computer monitor. There are strange shadows cast into the hollows of his face. “I think you should ask her,” he says.

He doesn’t. He wants to, but he doesn’t. It sits on the tip of his tongue every hour of every day he sits with her in her cramped hospital room: “Are you not letting yourself heal on purpose?”

Instead, he sits there like a jackass and watches pain get the better of her, for the first time since they were kids. At least once a day her expression will go vacant while he talks, fingers twisted into knots in her lap.

The third time it happens, he stops mid-thought. “Peko.” Her eyes are cloudy when they drift towards him. “You’re not listening, are you?”

She looks stricken to be caught. “I’m sorry.” She grips the mattress to twist herself more fully toward him. Her elbows tremble. “Would you consider starting again from the beginning? I’ll not let myself be distracted this time.”

“Will you cut it out?” He stands up. He wants to press her shoulders back, or cup her elbow until it relaxes, but can only get his hands to hover. “You can ignore me all damn day if you want.” 

His hovering doesn’t do jack shit. She only stops when her biceps give out and she tumbles the few inches back to the pillows, and he just stands there and lets her.

What kind of useless is he?

He curls and uncurls his fists. Breathe in: one, two, three, four. Breathe out: one, two, three, four. Whatever scraps of bravery he has left, it’s about time he found them.

He sets his palm against her back. She doesn’t make a sound, but he feels the expansion of her lungs from the way her skin shifts over her ribs. “C’mon,” he says. “Let me…”

She doesn’t say anything, but she understands anyway. She leans forward enough for him to reach the pillow that’s supposed to be supporting the small of her back; it’s mashed down so far it has to be uncomfortable, at this point.

The pillow’s a cheap, shitty thing. It’s all they’ve got, though. He fluffs it between his palms.

“... Does it hurt?” he asks.

“It’s not important,” she answers, like that’s any kind of answer at all.

“You don’t have to do that anymore.” She doesn’t reply. She avoids his gaze, and settles back against the newly fluffed pillow with murmured thanks. “It’s- It’s important to me, alright?” he tries again. “It matters if you’re in pain.” 

“Could you start again from the beginning?” she asks.

His jaw sets. It’s starting to ache from how often he clamps down on it.

He sits back down, and starts again.

*

A week later, he hoists himself up to sit on the edge of her bed, instead of plopping into the plastic folding chair like normal. He takes some private satisfaction in the way she blinks owlishly at him. At least it’s a facial expression.

He’d swiped Souda’s card deck on his way out this morning. Peko watches him shuffle, but it’s not until he’s dealing cards between them that she finally asks. “... What are you doing?”

“Two-ten-jack,” he says. He sets the remainder of the deck on the bed between them. It shifts a little, cards at the top sliding precariously, but Peko doesn’t move much. It’ll be fine, probably. “You remember how to play?”

“Yes, but—”

“Great.” He fans his cards out in front of his face. “You’re up.”

She humors him. She always does. She fumbles her cards a little, fingers unsteady, but she plays, slow-going as it is. She lays down a three of hearts. He drops the ten and scoops it up.

He keeps winning, over and over and over again. It’s by a thin margin every time: she loses by four, then by three, then by five, then by two. It’s not because they’re close games, or even because he’s any better than she is. It’s because she keeps throwing the last few tricks, right before she’s about to win.

He wants to say something about it. He almost does, when he realizes she’s doing it and some old, petty part of him raises its hackles in humiliation— but her eyes are brighter than he’s seen them since she woke up. She’s not the same rigid, passive statue she’s been so far. She isn’t digging her nails into the inside of her wrists to offset pain they can’t treat. 

It’s better progress than they’ve made in weeks.

“Would you like to play again?” she asks, lifting her eyes to his. The line of her brow is soft. It’s one of the longest sentences she’s said to him since she woke up that hasn’t been an apology.

He says, “Yeah,” and deals. He tells himself he’ll bring it up again another time. He tells himself he doesn’t want to hobble her progress. He tells himself her health is more important than his comfort.

She loses three more rounds in a row. 

“Keep ‘em,” he says when it’s time for him to leave, pressing the box into her palm. “So we can play tomorrow, too. If Souda starts complaining about it I’ll, I dunno. I’ll find new ones somewhere.”

She looks down at it, thumb tracing the faded design on the back of the box. He waits until it feels awkward, hands in his pockets, but she doesn’t say anything else. “Okay,” he says. He steps back toward the door. She still doesn’t look up. “Sonia’s gonna be pissed if I, uh, if I don’t show again, so—” 

“Wait,” she blurts. When he turns back, she looks startled by herself, fingers clutched around the pack of cards in her hand.

“Thank you for visiting,” she says, syllables stilted. “Fuyuhiko.”

For the first time in weeks (or months, or years), something light flutters in his chest. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ll see you soon, okay?”

*

He always shows up at the hospital in the afternoon, after lunch. She has rehab with Hinata in the morning, and he’s the most productive right after he wakes up. He gets his work done, she has time to recover from whatever it is Hinata puts her through, and anybody manning the front desk knows when to expect him. It works out.

It’s supposed to be Mioda’s turn, that day. He’d heard her cheerful check-in over the radio earlier that morning. (“Ibuki here, sounding off for the hospital! Peko-chan and Hajime-chan are here and diving right in! Ready to start another day!”) 

But when he shows up, after lunch, there’s no one in the lobby.

Familiarity tickles the back of his mind. There was another day he came to the hospital and found it empty. There was a reason for that, one he was too oblivious to see. She met him at the front, led him around by the nose like a dog, showed him what he expected to find, and then—

But that was a different day. He breathes in, and focuses on the differences. The sun slants at an angle through the open blinds. Mioda’s bright purple headphones are laid out on the reception desk, snaking around the old walkman Souda put together for her.

Today is not the same, no matter what prickle climbs the length of his spine. (Bathroom, his brain suggests. Medicine. Conversation. Cards. Anything.)

“Hey,” he calls, and it’s like hearing himself in stereo. “Anybody here?”

There’s a clatter. The door to the patient hall swings open. Tsumiki stops short on the threshold and stares at him, her eyes wild.

— No, not Tsumiki. Tsumiki isn’t here. That already happened; the simulation is _over._

 _Mioda._ Mioda splays her arms out across the open mouth of the doorway. He stares at the right angle of her elbow, and understands: she’s keeping him out. “Fuyuhiko-chan—”

Pinpricks of color bloom at the edges of his vision. It’s like there’s a rush from the top of his skull straight down, through his feet, leaving everything cold and heavy in its wake.

(His brain suggests: coma, collapse, sepsis, suicide.)

“What happened?”

“Fuyuhiko-chan, you- you gotta listen, okay? Ibuki can explain it, you just—”

He isn’t listening. Her voice is tinny and far away; it hurts his ears just to try, and all there is to listen to is her cutesy bullshit. He doesn’t care about her explanation. She’s trying to keep him from getting to Peko.

(He’d do anything not to feel that way again. He’d do anything. _Anything._ )

He crowds Mioda in the doorway. Her chin is trembling. “Get out of my way.”

“Fuyuhiko-chan—”

“I said—” He slams his knuckles against the frame of the door. “—get the _fuck_ out of my way.”

Her resolve crumbles. She folds in on herself, shoulders slouching in and chin dropping down. She bounces off the opposite edge of the door jamb when he shoves past her. 

The only operational hospital room is the first one on the left. The door is left hanging open in a way he knows she’d hate: ajar enough to see in, but not see back out. He turns the corner, and slams it back against the wall.

Her bed is empty. 

There’s a tray set at the foot of it, complete with a still-clean set of silverware and Peko’s low-impact lunch, cold and congealed in its bowl. The sheets are folded back at a neat angle. The pillows are stacked to support her spine when she sits up in bed.

“Ibuki doesn’t know what happened,” Mioda says behind him. “Peko-chan was there, and then she wasn’t, and then—”

He turns on her. She’s skinny, still, the high edges of her cheekbones jutting out from her face. She looks like she’d snap if he flicked her. 

“What the fuck did you do?”

“Nothing! I… I did the same things I always do! I didn’t know that—”

“Don’t give me that fucking bullshit!” His throat is already raw. His voice has to claw its way out, ragged at the edges. “This is _your fucking fault!_ ”

Mioda shrinks away from him. She collides with a wheeled shelf set up in the hallway, and sends an already-teetering box of glass syringes crashing to the floor. They each shatter with delicate, ringing sounds that, taken together, vibrate straight through his skull.

He can only hear the sound of his own breathing, in the silence afterwards.

She has the fingers of both hands twisted into the short necklace around her throat. It’s tight enough to dig into her skin on either side, the links leaving wide divots in her neck. It might leave marks, if she stays like that long enough. She might choke. She might pass out. Evidence burned into her throat from friction, and Tsumiki isn’t here to give them the answer, only Tsumiki lied, didn’t she, and he was supposed to do something about it, he was supposed to watch over them, that was the only thing his spare life was good for anymore, and he— and he—

Cold sweat breaks out on his neck and forehead. He presses his hands against his eyes until he sees spots.

Breathe. 

Four count in. 

Four count out. 

“Sorry,” he manages. He steps away from her, both hands up, his back to the wall. “I gotta— I gotta find her. I’m sorry. Get Sonia in here, okay?”

Mioda only starts to breathe again after he’s already out the door. He hears it behind him, a sickly rattle in her throat like a storm pushed through a pinhole.

*

Sonia is the one who raises the alarm. The walkie-talkie on his belt bursts into a cacophony of crackling noise, but in the end none of their panicking matters. He doesn’t need to go far. 

This island is dry, cracked, and rocky. Its beaches are more like cliffs, red crags crumbling into the ocean below. There were never any sun-warmed sandbars or shady inlets even in the simulation, when things were supposed to be polished and pristine. The best it had going for it were the views, tall plateaus dropping off into the wide, dark sea.

The real version isn’t even much of that, anymore. The water is choppy and polluted, and the wind is cutting when it gusts. The cliffs are eroded and exposed, with all the trees either dead or blown over. They’re more like a stage now, to get a proper look at everything that can’t be undone.

He finds her slumped on her knees not five minutes south of the hospital, staring out across the water. It could almost look like she sat there on purpose, except that Peko never kneels like that, legs splayed and spine hunched. Her expression is vacant. She doesn’t look up even when he’s standing right in front of her.

There’s a familiar, hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach. It creeps up, cold tendrils numbing his chest from the inside out. It makes his heart race, and turns his mouth dry. 

Wouldn’t it feel better? 

He could sit down with her. They could be together while they let the wind and sea spray erode them, until their skin is as red and raw and cracked as the island. They could let it swallow them up again, and then they’d be in sync again, be _one_ again. 

Wouldn’t they?

“Fuck this,” he mutters.

He bends to slide both arms around her waist. She doesn’t fight him; her arms circle his neck, and she lets him lift her back up to standing. It isn’t hard. She barely weighs anything at all anymore, with all her heavy muscle atrophied away.

She tries to let go of him as soon as she’s on her feet, but her knees buckle under the weight. She doesn’t reach for him again, even though he’s standing right there, and he has to grab her by both elbows to keep her from falling. It’s only because she weighs so little that they don’t both go tumbling into the dirt.

He’d thought she was doing better. He’d thought they were making progress, even if it was slow. 

Breathe in: one, two, three, four. Breathe out: one, two— and then it slips through the spaces of his concentration: “Goddammit, Peko.”

She relents, one arm sliding around his shoulders. Her voice is muffled, with her face turned down against his collar. “I’m sorry.”

He’s supposed to give himself room to think. He’s supposed to slow down, count if he needs to, let the kneejerk reaction dissipate. 

“No,” he snaps instead. “You’re not. I dunno what the hell you’re trying to prove, but the longer you act like this, the longer you’re gonna be stuck in that damn hospital bed, understand?” She doesn’t answer one way or the other. He grits his teeth.

“You’re upset,” she murmurs.

“Oh, yeah? Do I seem fucking upset to you? Great, glad we cleared that up.” 

The anger in his chest colors with shame the second it’s out of his mouth. She goes silent against his shoulder. The wind whips around them, and he breathes it in: one, two, three, four.

“Sorry,” he says, on his exhale. She doesn’t say anything. “Look, I can’t— I can’t do this right now. Let’s just get back, okay?”

She doesn’t fight to stay, but her feet drag in the dirt when they go.

*

Sonia is the only one in the hospital lobby by the time they make it back. She hurries from around the reception desk when she sees them, and holds the door open for them to limp inside. 

“Thank goodness,” she says, one hand over her heart. “It is a relief to see you safe, Pekoyama-san. The others will be pleased to hear as well, I am sure.”

Mioda is gone. The glass has been swept up from the floor, and the empty box thrown away. Sonia looks at him, smile soft, and he swallows.

“Sonia, I—”

“Please.” She flashes her palm at him. “Pekoyama-san needs her rest, yes? I will take care of informing the others that she has been found. There is water waiting for you both in room one.” It’s not forgotten. There’s no mistaking the polite steel in the look she gives him. But for now, she steps back to reception. “It is no trouble.”

The blankets of the bed are already pulled back. There are two glasses of water set on the bedside table, both on coasters even though the table itself is made of metal. There is a single plastic daisy in a jar.

Peko’s grip on him tightens in the doorway. Her heels slide against the linoleum, like a dog afraid of the kennel. 

He lets her down onto the bed as gently as he can, but she lets go of him halfway through. The springs squeak when she hits the mattress. He still has his hands out to hold her up, like an asshole.

He puts them in his pockets. Inhale, four count. “Listen,” he says. “About before, I…”

“You don’t need to apologize.” She lifts her chin, but she’s not looking at him. She’s staring at some infuriating middle-distance beyond his shoulder. “It was my choice, and my mistake. I see that now. I’m sorry for the inconvenience I’ve caused. I understand and appreciate the effort you've put in to support me.”

His throat closes up. The silence stretches like a yoke across his shoulders, painful. “Is that what you think this is?” The door is still open behind him. He doesn’t lower his voice. “Some… fucking _obligation?_ ”

Her gaze doesn’t waver in his direction at all. She doesn’t answer.

“At least look at me, Peko.”

She won’t.

The miserable embers in his chest reignite. He’s supposed to give himself room. Slow down. Count if he needs to. Reason, don’t react.

Turns out he’s shitty at basically all of that.

He’ll have his rationalizations, later. He just wants her to understand. He wants her to see herself the way he sees her: ironclad and radiant, but also human, also suffering. She’s not an unstoppable force or an immovable object. She’s not a sword. She’s not a tool. She’s not a _thing._

In the moment, though, all he thinks is: _Enough._

He grabs her jaw with one hand, and turns her chin toward him. He only wants her to look at him, but then she is, eyes wide and skin warm, breathing, yielding, alive. She is _alive._

His chest aches, his head spins, and then he’s kissing her.

It’s too fast and too clumsy, their noses bumping, but she lets him do it. She doesn’t flinch away, not even just from surprise. Her hands are folded in her lap. Her lips part under his, hesitant but obedient.

The word rings in his head like an alarm, or a siren, or a squeal of failing brakes. _Obedient._ He can’t put it back once he’s thought it. It's a spot of black ink on his brain, seeping wider.

( _Obedient_ like her struggling to eat the candy he smuggled into middle school, so that no one in his class would find out about his sweet tooth.)

The muscles in her neck are taut from the angle he’s forced her into.

( _Obedient_ like a metallic crack against Koizumi’s skull, bright and loud in the shitty acoustics of the beach house.)

She hasn’t touched him once of her own volition since she woke up. She’s only ever touched him because she had to, or because he put his hands on her first. She still isn’t touching him, now.

( _Obedient_ like him standing over her with his gun cocked against her temple and the edge of her katana against his carotid, because he could, because he wanted to, because he loved the feeling of despair mirrored for both of them, and hearing her say, “Yes.”)

None of this is how he wanted it to be.

He’s fucked it up.

He pulls away, and she lets him do that, too, lashes fluttering when she looks back at him. The tip of her nose and her cheeks and her ears are flushed.

“Shit,” he whispers, and he’s having trouble catching his breath. Not in the good way. In the bad way, where each one is too quick and too small to make a difference. “Fuck, I’m— Shit. Peko. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”

“It’s alright,” she says.

The tightness in his chest swells to his throat. “It’s not,” he says. “In no fucking universe. Under no fucking circumstances. You get that, right?”

She’s schooled her features into that same perfect, passive mask, but her ears are still pink. Her breath is still light, when she opens her mouth to answer. She’s beautiful. He feels like a spider circling a drain.

“It’s been a stressful afternoon for you,” she says. “I… I don’t mind if—”

“Don’t,” he chokes. “Don’t say that. _Don’t._ ”

Her chin dips toward her chest. She says, “I understand, Fuyuhiko,” and his heart shrivels to stone. The syllables of his name sound warped and wrong in her mouth. They sound like _young master._

He’d thought they were making progress. Only he hasn’t been doing anything at all, has he? He just keeps looking at her to do all the work, like he always has.

Her eyes are on her lap. She’s waiting. Obedient. 

“I’m gonna go get Sonia,” he says, one hand already on the door jamb. “She’ll bring your medicine in a bit, okay? She- She’ll take care of you.”

He runs, like the coward he is.

*

“Pekoyama can be discharged from the hospital,” Hinata says at their status meeting, barely two weeks later.

The circle lights up with chatter. It’s only six of them, set up in the hotel lobby; it’s Hanamura’s turn to mind the hospital, and Peko’s not supposed to be making the trek out to this island, yet.

Fuyuhiko sits up in his seat. “What? But—”

“She can handle it,” Hinata says, before he can get the objection out. “Physically. She’ll need someone to watch her, after what happened. But it should be fine.” His eyes flicker up from his laptop, balanced on one knee. “I have confidence in her.”

Reaction curls on Fuyuhiko’s tongue. _What the fuck is that supposed to mean?_ He swallows it back down.

Sonia nearly knocks herself in the chin with the nib of her dry-erase marker when she claps her hands. “This is excellent news!” She’s beaming at him. They all are. (Except Hinata, who only stares.) Fuyuhiko focuses on a scuff near the toe of his left shoe. “I am sure Pekoyama-san must be ‘totally over’ the hospital amenities by now. It will be a relief for her to be somewhere more familiar.” 

She turns back to her whiteboard, and scrubs out the assignment next to Owari’s name with her elbow. “Owari-san, do you feel comfortable taking over the inventory from Kuzuryuu-san?” She does the same to the assignment next to his name. His stomach churns. “Just for this week, so that he can assist Pekoyama-san with her move-in.”

“Yeah,” Owari says. “I got it, no problem.”

He hears himself say, “Don’t.”

Sonia doesn’t turn around. She’s bent over, filling in _Pekoyama_ next to his name on the assignment chart. “Sorry?”

“I said, don’t swap them.” Sonia’s marker hesitates when she looks over her shoulder at him. She’s only gotten far enough to write the first character of Peko’s name. “Leave me on inventory. It’ll be a pain to explain everything I’ve been doing. Owari can help Peko with her stuff. Not like there’s a lot of it.”

Now they’re all looking at each other. (Hinata looks at the ceiling.) The silence is awkward. Fuyuhiko is determined not to be the one to break it, arms crossed tight over his stomach.

“Uh.” Souda cracks first. “No offense, dude, but I don’t think what you’ve been doing is that complicated. I’m pretty sure Owari can handle some counting.”

“That’s not the point,” Fuyuhiko snaps.

“I think what Souda-san is trying to say,” Sonia interrupts gently, “is that we all assumed you would prefer to assist Pekoyama-san with her transition. If that is the case, we do not mind juggling the responsibility between us so that you may have the opportunity to do so.”

“And _I’m_ saying it’s stupid to cause all that trouble just for that.”

“I see.” Sonia hovers. She glances at Hinata, but he doesn’t give her anything back. “Is that alright with you, Owari-san?”

Owari slouches down in her seat. “Yeah, I guess. Doesn’t really matter to me. Just pick somethin’ and I’ll do it.”

“Then we are decided.” Sonia wipes the words away with her palm. She writes _Pekoyama_ again, this time next to Owari’s name instead. “Owari-san will assist Pekoyama-san’s move-in to her cottage, and Kuzuryuu-san will continue maintaining our supplies. Agreed?”

No one says anything. Fuyuhiko turns his face away. Souda eventually murmurs, “I mean, I guess so,” and that’s the end of it.

“Then we are all dismissed,” Sonia says. “Thank you again for all your help, everyone. Please have a safe and restful night.”


	2. Chapter 2

Owari brings her a fresh change of clothes, the morning she’s to be discharged from the hospital. It’s all plain, loose polyester: socks, underwear, a black t-shirt, and elastic black pants. The sneakers have their laces pre-tied, the knots loose enough that Peko can slide her feet into them without having to undo them.

She holds them in her lap and looks at them. The laces are dark blue, their loops perfect.

“They’re all like that,” Owari says from the doorway. “Hinata’s been doing it since day one. I wanted to deck him when he gave me mine. Almost cracked my head open on the floor!” 

Peko thinks she’s meant to find humor in the story. Owari is smiling while she recounts it, at least. She’s braced diagonally in the doorframe, feet on one side and shoulders on the other. 

She’s small. It’s never been a word Peko thought to apply to her before, with all her height and muscle and force of personality, but while most of them are already some degree of too-thin, Owari toes the line of emaciated. Her jaw is sharp and prominent. The bones of her elbows jut out from beneath her skin.

“Hurry up and put ‘em on,” she says. “This place gives me the creeps.”

Peko agrees. She leans down to set the shoes on the floor, and wriggles her feet in toe-first. It takes longer than it should. If Owari notices, she doesn’t say so.

Ostensibly, she’s come to help move Peko’s things into her cottage. But Peko’s ‘things’ amount to a single box of trinkets she doesn’t want to keep, including the clothes she was wearing when she was brought out of the pod.

Owari hands her the box anyway. The heaviest item is the box itself, and it still strains the flexors in her forearms. When she stands up from the bed, her right elbow burns. 

(The blade caught on a ligament on its way in. It twisted when it was removed, shredding skin and muscle.)

“You got it?” Owari asks.

Peko nods. She doesn’t redistribute the weight of the box in her arms; it is not heavy, and the damage is not real.

“Alright! Then let’s blow this joint!”

It’s easier said than done; the islands all feel more spread out than Peko remembers them being. She can’t tell if that was an intentional aspect of the simulation, or a shift she missed after being eliminated so early from the game, or if it’s merely a function of her fatigue, each step taking more effort than it should. 

It’s a rare, cloudless day. The sun bears down on her, heat soaking into her dark clothes.

“You good?” Owari calls back to her.

“Yes,” Peko answers.

By the time they’ve crossed the first bridge, the burn in her elbow has spread up her bicep and into her chest. She takes small breaths; if she breathes too deeply, it’s like her sternum is splitting down the middle. 

(The blade sunk in at an angle, pierced her arm and then sunk further, between her ribs. It punctured her right lung.) 

Peko concentrates on keeping her grip on the box, and on putting each foot on even ground. Ahead of her, Owari is telling a story that sounds like it might still be about Hinata and his pre-emptively tied sneakers, but Peko can’t be certain. The sound of her voice is murky and out of focus, and it’s difficult to sort detail from noise.

Her hair is in her face. It sticks to sweat on her neck and the underside of her chin. She wants to push it back, but curls her nails into the flat edges of the box instead. It’s a situation she’s put herself into. She’ll get relief from it when she learns to braid her hair again.

Until then, she keeps her breathing shallow. She thinks herself through each step, and does not think about how she’s sweating much more than she should for the temperature, humidity, and level of effort.

The narrow scope of her concentration clouds her peripheral vision; it’s inevitable that she eventually collides with something, headlong. The box jostles painfully against her ribs, and she almost loses her balance in the shifting dust of the road. When she raises her head, the _something_ is Owari, one hand hooked around the top flap of the box.

“Hey,” she says. “We’re gonna take a break.”

“I would prefer not to waste time,” Peko answers. 

Owari ignores her. She leaves Peko where she is and sits on the side of the road with her legs splayed out in front of her. She leans back on her hands to frown up at the clear gap of sky above them, and doesn’t say anything else.

“I’m fine, Owari,” Peko says.

This central island was grassy and manicured, in the simulation. Here it’s cracked and barren, mostly loose dirt and little else. Owari still flops back into it, arms spread out and smeared with dust.

“I know you are,” she says. “Ain’t sayin’ you’re not.” 

She says it so plainly that Peko can only take her at her word.

“Coach used to get on my case all the time,” Owari goes on, after a few long seconds of silence. “‘Bout how I’m not supposed to use up all my strength in one go just because I can. It’s stupid, right? Like, if I can take somebody out, I should just take ‘em out, and if I can’t, then I should do as much damage as I can. Why waste a bunch of time dragging it out?”

Peko understands the parallel she’s trying to draw. It’s clumsy, but self-explanatory. “I understand,” she says. “But in this case—”

“A couple minutes,” Owari says. “Then we’ll go.”

Peko closes her eyes, and breathes in. Her chest burns, but in the time they’ve been delayed it’s dimmed from piercing to merely discomforting.

“... Fine.”

She opts to stand while she waits.

*

The cottages are not assigned. Hinata had emphasized that detail, when he first informed her of her discharge. 

“You’ll have a choice,” he’d said. “There are plenty still open.”

Regardless, Owari turns down the left side of the walkway when they arrive. The others have clustered their choices together; the left section is nearly full, leaving the right one completely empty.

It makes sense, from a strategic perspective. The cottages are more defensible when they’re together, and there’s no reason to believe the fifteen of them wouldn’t be targets, even in a remote place like this. With so many of them as vulnerable as they are, any advantage is one worth having.

Peko hovers at the fork of the walkway all the same.

There is one cottage left available on the main side, all the way at the end. It was Hanamura’s in the simulation, Peko recalls. He’d apparently opted to take Tanaka’s instead, when it was his turn.

(Tanaka remains in his coma, with no signs of recovery yet. Peko understands that everyone who is still incapacitated is either a killer or a victim.

She also understands that she has upset the ratio of those awake.)

Owari realizes Peko hasn’t followed her only when she reaches the door. “Hey!” she calls. “What’s up?”

Peko turns down the right side of the walkway. She follows the row of cottages almost to the end; it feels otherworldly and strange, familiar and not. Second to last, on the right. This one was hers, in the simulation.

She balances the box against her hip just long enough to test the doorknob. It swings open without protest. They’ll need to get keys for the locks.

Owari comes up behind her. “This the one you want?” she asks. She sounds skeptical.

Peko looks in from the doorway. None of the personal touches that had been added for her in the simulation remain; it’s sparsely furnished, and coated in dust. She imagines the others are in largely the same condition.

In the simulation, the young master had spilled Koizumi’s photos across the floor of Peko’s cottage. It had been a bright, cloudless day like this one, as picturesque as all the ones before it. She had recognized the photos for what they were, or thought she had: a collage of Koizumi’s missteps and the young master’s anger.

He didn’t remember the incident depicted in the pictures. Peko hadn’t, either. 

She remembers now.

She says, “Yes.”

*

Owari stays with her through the afternoon. “I’m s’posed to keep an eye on you so you don’t wander off again,” she says, straightforward, and Peko is in no position to argue. The concern is valid, with her recent behavior.

There’s more to be done, either way. Months of neglect have left the cottage caked in dust and dirt; the sheets of the bed need to be changed, and the mirrors in the bathroom wiped down. Hinata had warned her about the state of it. The others haven’t had time to comb over the other cottages, just yet. There’s too much to do and not enough hands to do it, he’d said. 

It’s fine. It’s only right that she contribute. 

Owari brings supplies in from the other cottage: brooms and rags and fresh linens. Her sweeping and dusting is halfhearted at best, but that’s fine too. Peko bridges the gap herself; as degraded as they are, her muscles still remember the motions. It’s thorough, repetitive. It gives her mind the opportunity to retreat somewhere warm and still and silent.

It’s late in the day before she’s able to start on the bathroom. She has to clean the mirrors in slow, methodical pieces; her lungs burn when she raises her arms above her head, and dark splotches cloud her vision if she keeps them that way for too long.

(The blade came from above and behind. It shattered her scapula and then lodged itself in bone; it had to be wrenched out like a pry bar, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.)

“Heyyy!” Owari whoops from the other room. “Look who it is!”

Peko has only half the mirror finished. The reflection of the front room is grimy on one side, but the image is clear enough: the young master stands in the open doorway of the cottage, looking at her.

His gaze jumps away as soon as she makes eye contact. He has a box cradled against his chest, the top flaps folded together to hold it closed. His hands are full, so he and Owari exchange a friendly bump of elbows.

“Yo,” he says. “How’s it going?”

Owari leans against the doorframe, and squints appraisingly back into the room. It’s just as empty as it was when they arrived. “Pretty good,” she says. “We’re pretty much done. What d’you think, Pekoyama?”

“Yes.”

He looks at the room before he looks back at her. He seems preoccupied, but it’s difficult to tell; his face isn’t the open, expressive canvas it used to be. Or maybe it’s her, maybe she’s not as adept at reading what’s written there anymore. Maybe she never was.

When he does look at her, he can’t seem to focus on her face for longer than a moment or two. “Right,” he says. He shuffles at the threshold of the door. “Well, I... Uh, I brought this for you, Peko.” He lifts the box up. “I had it, so… Figured I’d save you guys the trip.”

He isn’t coming inside, so she leaves her rag in the sink and goes to him. (With her mind drawn back to the forefront, she feels the grinding objection in her knees.) She doesn’t recognize the box, and it isn’t labelled, aside from her surname written on it in permanent marker. It’s his handwriting. 

“What is it?” she asks.

“It’s the stuff you had on you when the Future Foundation picked us up,” Owari tells her. “Kuzuryuu put all the boxes together. He hides ‘em in the back of that smelly old hotel building.”

“It’s not _smelly,_ ” he says.

Owari grunts. “To you, maybe.”

“And I don’t _hide_ them, either. Are you missing the whole point on purpose?”

“What’s in it?” Peko asks.

He looks down. There is a small gap in the top of the box, where the bent flaps aren’t fully flush, but the shadows are too deep for her to properly see inside it.

“Just a buncha crap,” Owari says. She sounds bored. “Mine was mostly clothes.”

“Clothes,” he confirms. “And- other stuff. I don’t know if…” He jostles the box higher in his arms. Something metallic clatters inside. “Just, you should get to decide if you want to look at it or not. And what you want to do with it.”

“Do with it,” Peko repeats. “Like what?”

Owari counts on her fingers. “I trashed mine. And Hanamura’s, ‘cause he asked me to. Mioda and Souda burned theirs, Sonia threw hers out into the ocean, and Hinata and Kuzuryuu kept theirs.” She tilts her head in his direction. “Right?”

His only answer is, “Yeah.”

Peko holds her arms out. “I’ll take it.”

He’s careful not to touch her when he hands it off, which makes the hand-off clumsy. The weight put on her biceps is uneven, and the right one buckles unexpectedly. The box sinks sideways, which sends the contents sliding inside, which makes the weight distribution even more uneven.

“Shit.” He fumbles. “Sorry. You got it?”

She braces the bottom of the box against her stomach. She manages to answer, “Yes,” but even she can hear the grit in her own voice. He doesn’t believe her.

“Here,” he says, and shuffles forward to take on some of the weight. “Let me—” His hands slide between hers on the underside of the box. The edge of his pinky brushes the inside of her wrist. She remembers his lips tasted like sea salt.

Her muscles spasm. It’s the only explanation she has for how her biceps abruptly contract, twisting pain up into her shoulder. It jerks the box out of his hands, and sends her stumbling back a step and a half. She can feel Owari’s hand hovering at her back, a spotter’s safety net.

His face has changed, but she can’t read him well enough anymore to know what it means. She watches the way his mouth forms around the initial plosive of her name— and she cannot think about his mouth in that context.

(He wishes it didn’t happen. Therefore, it did not happen.)

“Thank you,” she says, before he finds the sound.

His jaw snaps shut. He returns his hands to his pockets with a slow, deliberate roll of his shoulders. “Right,” he says. “Sorry about the— yeah.” He clears his throat, and looks at Owari. “Anyway, I... I gotta get going. Got Souda up my ass about a bunch of resistors we don’t have.”

Owari misses his cue. She says, “Okay?” and looks at Peko for confirmation.

For a moment, he doesn’t leave. He lingers in the doorway and looks at her too, gaze finally steady on her face. There is something to say. It crowds the breath in her throat, but she doesn’t know what the words are.

“Thank you,” she says again.

He nods. He leaves. 

Peko sets the box on the floor, next to the one she and Owari brought from the hospital, and returns to the bathroom.

*

She doesn’t sleep any better in the cottage than she did in the hospital.

She tries. She lies in her bed, on top of the sheets, and closes her eyes. She gets as far as the hazy half-place between sleeping and waking, when her measured control over her muscles and her mind begins to unravel.

She is seventeen and beginning her third year of high school. Her skills are at their peak, but the young master turns them away. He calls her ‘Pekoyama’ in front of their classmates. She is always working harder to be what he needs.

She is sixteen, and the sea around Jabberwock Island gleams pink in the morning sun. The young master clashes with the other students. He picks fights and makes threats and isolates himself. She worries for his safety.

She is nineteen, and the world is over. She pins a dog to the ground with her sword, the blade pierced through the muscle of its back leg. It whimpers and whines, its claws scrabbling uselessly in the dirt. She waits hours, until it stops moving.

She is twenty-one, and she is alive when she should be dead.

She is all of them, and none of them. In that place of half-sleep, the well-defined edges of her mind lose their clarity. Memories seep across the boundaries like watercolors, mixing together until the colorless remains of her self are muddy and dark.

She is nineteen and escorting the young master to the morgue.

She is twenty-one and washing Koizumi’s blood off her skin in the shower room.

She is seventeen and breathing in the smell of rot until she vomits.

She is sixteen, and wakes gasping.

She tries two more times. After the third attempt, it’s too late to try again; color peeks up from beneath the horizon, just visible through the slats of her window. She sits up on the mattress, legs crossed underneath her, and lets the silence crowd in from all sides. 

The cottage isn’t any different from the hospital. It yawns around her the same, an empty swath of space. The colors are warmer, but the finish of the wood is still cold. 

She rolls the heel of her hand against the outside of her thigh.

(The blade had been aimed at the small of her back, but glanced off the guard of another weapon. It only skimmed her leg, but the angle sent it gouging into the soft flesh beneath the young master’s ribs.) 

The box Fuyuhiko brought for her is still at the end of her bed, the flaps still folded shut. It contains clothes, he’d said, and other things.

She gets up. She closes the shutters of the window, and peels off the loose t-shirt and shorts she wore to bed. She stands naked in front of the full-length mirror in the bathroom, and inspects the body that she’s in.

She doesn’t recognize it, from any angle. It’s the same as the muddy center of her mind, an unintelligible mishmash of diverging histories. She is too thin at her ribs but too full at her hips. Her hair is at once too short and too long. She recognizes some scars, struggles to recall others, and searches for still others that don’t exist at all.

She lays her palm flat against her stomach, where there is a purple, ragged cut arcing from her left hip to her ribcage. She draws her fingers up the line of puckered flesh and remembers: Munakata Kyosuke had in a rare moment gained the upper hand against her. He’d intended to kill her, and had come very close. Tsumiki had stitched it up while she was still awake, giggling, tracing spirals in the blood. 

She twists at the waist. There is a swath of raised, shiny skin on the outside of her right shoulder, and she remembers: the young master had fired his gun point-blank into a crowd of people, the side of the barrel laid flat against her skin. He’d been aiming at nothing in particular. The crowd had only been a net to catch the bullet. All he’d wanted was to see her flesh bubble and to hear her scream, and he’d gotten frustrated when he only achieved the former. He’d hit her with the butt of his revolver, leaving a divot beneath her collarbone.

She dips her finger into the space. _Fuyuhiko,_ her mind corrects belatedly. She regrets it as soon as she thinks it.

(She had responded. She struck him across the jaw with the hilt of her sword, hard enough to send him to the ground in a spray of blood and spit. He coughed and cursed into the dirt, and the crowd had taken the opportunity to scatter.

She stood over him, and touched the tip of her blade to the thin stretch of skin at the dip of his collarbone, over his trachea. She considered the ramifications of killing him, not for the first time and not for the last. 

He sat up on his elbows, eyes bright, and laughed until his chest heaved. She’d had to draw her blade back, just a fraction; it wouldn’t do at all if he sliced his own neck open. “Hey Peko,” he’d said, between gasps. “Isn’t this perfect?”)

She refocuses on the mirror. It’s her face again; the current one, at least, or probably. She is twenty-one.

The box behind her is caught in the reflection. From this angle, she can read the block letters across the side. _Pekoyama._ She stares at it. She isn’t sure for how long.

Eventually, the sun rises.

*

Owari knocks early. “Woah,” she says, when Peko opens the door, “you look like crap.”

Peko touches her fingers to the half-moon of skin beneath her left eye. It’s entirely possible she does. “I didn’t sleep well,” she says.

“Oh, yeah, that.” Owari grins at her; Peko has already lost track of the number of times she’s done so since yesterday morning. “Don’t worry about it. It sucks the first few days, but it gets easier. Beds’re better here than the junk we’ve got up in the hospital.”

Peko doesn’t disagree, so she doesn’t say anything. Owari doesn’t seem bothered. She takes the silence for what it is.

“Anyway, breakfast is up at the lobby, if you want it,” she says. She jerks one thumb over her shoulder. “You remember how to get there, right?”

“Yes,” Peko answers. The implication isn’t lost on her. “... You won’t be coming?”

Owari hunches her shoulders. “Eh. The food’s pretty whatever, you know? Even Hanamura can only do so much with the crap we get. I’m not really feelin’ it.”

There was a shift in the conversation, somewhere. The interaction suddenly feels off, in a way that's difficult to pinpoint. Body language, or inflection, or— something. She doesn’t know Owari well enough to read her mannerisms.

She doesn’t know what to say, so she only says, “Alright.” Owari waves and leaves toward the beach, her spine bent and her arms pillowed behind her head.

Peko goes to the hotel by herself. She’s one of the last to arrive; Hanamura is using the reception desk as a workstation to ladle creamy oatmeal out into bowls, and the others congregate around him, half line and half crowd. The only exceptions are Sonia, who sits alone by the window, and Hinata, who has his laptop open on one of the derelict arcade machines.

Hinata is the first to notice her. He says, “Pekoyama,” sharply enough that the others all look at him, then swing back around to look at her.

The weight of six attentions trained on her at once, all varying degrees of surprised or concerned, presses her back towards the exit. She grips the edge of the doorframe to keep herself in place. 

“Owari isn’t with you?” Hinata asks.

The room is quiet. Peko can’t read any of their expressions, so she settles for the truth. “She decided against breakfast this morning,” she says. She sees understanding light one by one across their faces, and still doesn’t understand. “Is something the matter?”

“Shit,” Kuzuryuu says under his breath.

Across the room, Sonia stirs. “She cannot be alone,” she says. It sounds like she reaches for her diaphragm but makes it only to her lungs, her voice breathy and unsteady. She smooths trembling fingers over her knees, but doesn’t manage to stand. “I… I should...”

“W-Wait.” Souda shoulders his way out of the skinny breakfast line. “I’ll do it,” he says. He reaches one shaking hand out in Sonia’s direction. “You stay here, Miss Sonia.” 

Sonia lifts uncertain eyes, but doesn’t say anything. Kuzuryuu glances at her, then back. “You sure?”

“I… I was kinda able to get through to her the last time,” Souda says. “I mean, I think I get where she’s coming from. Kind of. Lemme go.”

No one objects. 

Peko steps aside to let him pass when he reaches her. She doesn’t say anything, but something must show on her face, because he smiles at her, small and tight. “Don’t worry about it, Pekoyama,” he says. “You didn’t know.”

A gloom settles over the lobby, but the motions of the day don’t cease. Hanamura takes two bowls off the reception desk, and begins handing the remaining five out to the others. There is not one set aside for himself.

Mioda brings a bowl to Sonia. Hinata gets up to take his.

Kuzuryuu brings the last to her.

“Hey,” he says. He’s stopped a few feet away from her. “C’mon. You can come sit down.”

She’s still in the doorway, she realizes, with her fingers still wrapped around the frame. She lets go, and follows him to one of the lobby’s faded couches. He gestures for her to sit, so she does; he perches on the edge of the coffee table across from her, his knees catty-corner to hers. 

“Here.” He holds one of the bowls out to her. She reaches up to take it from the bottom, and it warms her palms, just on the edge of too-hot.

“Thank you, Kuzuryuu,” she says.

There is a palpable stretch of silence. 

He looks startled, confused, maybe hurt. She rewinds in her head to find her mistake. Did she not say what she thought she did? He specifically instructed her to use his name instead of his title, so that the other students wouldn’t—

Understanding clatters its way in, too late. (She is sixteen, and their professional relationship does not exist on this island.) When she finds the words to apologize, he’s already said, “Yeah. Uh, you’re welcome,” and dropped his gaze into his bowl.

She looks down at her breakfast. Even with supplies as meager as they are, it still looks appetizing, with a fluffy consistency and pale beige coloring. The others eat around her, spoons ringing against bowls at uneven intervals.

“So…” He clears his throat and bows his head. It’s to muffle his voice while at the same time disguising the fact that they’re having a conversation at all. It’s a familiar habit. “You look tired,” he says, and then ruins the effect by lifting his eyes enough to look at her. “I mean, did… did you sleep okay? Last night?”

Technically, he’s lifted only the one eye to look at her. Owari had talked about him wearing a patch in her more colorful and bombastic retelling of the simulation, and a hazy memory of one lingers in the recesses of Peko’s memories, but as long as she’s been this self, she’s never seen it. As far as she knows, he’s only worn the scar.

(She remembers: messy blood on her fingertips, the smell of copper in the back of her throat, and his strained laughter in her ears. Whether she was the one holding the blade or not is immaterial. It was always her responsibility to see him whole and unharmed.)

“It was… an adjustment,” Peko says.

He swallows a bite of his breakfast with a grimace. She imagines it’s bland, no matter how well it’s made. “Yeah,” he says. “I mean, I get it. I know what you’re talking about.”

His jaw works. He wants to say something else, so she waits. “Listen,” he starts, but the rest of the sentence flounders in his throat. He rubs at his temple. “Just… First thing, I’m not trying to bullshit you or anything. Okay?”

He’s focused on the empty end of his spoon, his brow pinched down. It’s important to him, whatever he wants to say. She doesn’t want to discourage him. “Alright.”

It takes him a few more long seconds to sort out the words. He drags his eyes (eye) back to her face, and the look he gives her is sympathetic to the point of intensity. It makes her want to break the eye contact, but she doesn’t.

“You know you can tell someone, right?” he says. “If it... gets bad. You don’t have to just tolerate it.” He hesitates, and when she doesn’t fill the space, finishes: “... Hinata has ideas for stuff that can help, sometimes.”

She doesn’t recognize him either, she realizes. She’s always known the kind, gentle core of him, but she’s never seen him let it sit so plainly on his surface, before now. The softer edges suit him the way she always quietly thought they might: compassion and leadership and responsibility.

She should be happy for him and the progress he’s made. She is happy. She is grateful to have the opportunity to see it.

She looks down at her lap, her throat tight. Her breakfast is starting to get cold.

The others finish up their meals. Mioda tells Sonia a story about a pair of singing alley cats on their way out of the lobby, their elbows intertwined. Hinata has sunk into his work, his shoulders curled over the keyboard of his laptop.

When she’s been silent long enough, Fuyuhiko sets his palm against his knee and pushes himself up to standing. “You should eat,” he tells her. “It’ll help. That’s not bullshit either, I swear.”

“I know,” she answers.

“Okay.” He looks back over his shoulder, and his frown flattens into a grimace. “Smack Hinata if he doesn’t wrap it up in a few minutes. I’m gonna be pissed if he puts you behind schedule.” 

“I will.”

“Okay,” he says again. When he looks at her, the lines of his face are weighed back down. “Then... I’ll see you, alright?”

He leaves.

After that, it’s only her and Hinata left in the hotel; more precisely, maybe, only her and the rattle of Hinata’s typing. She scrapes at the edge of her bowl with her spoon.

If the oatmeal was appetizing once, it isn’t now. The consistency is cold and thick, and it slithers down her throat when she swallows. Queasiness bubbles in her stomach, and seeps up the back of her throat. She manages three bites before she can’t manage any more.

(She watched three separate blades pierce her stomach. The wounds gaped, and spilled black gastrointestinal blood out over the young master’s chest.)

She dumps the rest of the bowl out into the parched, empty garden behind the hotel.

*

She doesn’t need to rouse Hinata. He finds her when it’s time, his laptop tucked under his elbow.

“Pekoyama,” he says. “Are you ready?”

She nods. Being discharged from the hospital doesn’t mean she’s finished her regimen of physical therapy; the only difference now is that their sessions are scheduled in his cottage, instead of behind the closed door of her hospital room.

There is a table set up in the main room. At the center is the stack of coins they’ve been using for her fine motor control exercises. They come in various sizes, whatever Hinata could find: wide plastic medallions and individual yen pieces and small, smooth buttons.

They’re starting a new set of translational exercises today. Hinata shows her with one of the smaller buttons: passed to his palm, then back, then set aside. She begins with the largest medallion, and makes it one step down in the stack, to the fat 500 yen coin. 

The metal is harder to keep a grip on than the plastic, and the smell of it on her skin makes her head ache. She fumbles the coin while passing it back up to her fingers; it hits the table at an angle and goes spinning to the floor.

She looks at it, tucked behind the leg of the table. It should be simple to bend to retrieve it, but the center of her back shrieks with pain, and objects to even tiny adjustments of her posture. Even now, with her body as unfamiliar to her as it’s become, she understands that picking the coin back up while still remaining seated is outside the range of her flexibility. 

That’s where her memory ends. 

When it begins again, the room is darker, and wind is rattling the cottage’s only window. Hinata has his laptop open on the table. He isn’t typing; he watches something on the screen, his chin set in one hand.

“You’re back,” he says, without looking up.

Peko looks down. The 500 yen piece is back on the table, stacked neatly with the other coins. They’re separated into piles, organized first by color and then by size.

“You were gone for a while,” he tells her. “... I got bored.”

Some of the flatness in his tone and expression wrinkles. After so many weeks of sessions, she’s learned to read embarrassment in it. His wrinkles are the only parts of him that are still Hinata, flickers of color against a monotone background. Some days he is nothing but wrinkles. Most days he is nothing at all.

It upsets some of the others, Fuyuhiko especially. But to Peko, it’s one of the few things that still makes sense.

She watches him snap his laptop shut and rearrange the coins back into a single pile. She doesn’t apologize for wasting his time. It would change nothing, and she isn’t in a position to promise it won’t happen again.

Hinata pushes the stack of coins to the center of the table. She’s reaching across to take them when he says, “We don’t have to keep doing this, you know.”

She looks up at him. His wrinkles have smoothed back into nothing.

“Does it still hurt?” he asks.

(The blade dug up from below, clipped past her spine at the center and cracked her third and fourth rib on the right side.)

The shriek has calmed to a hum, but it’s still there, a steady distraction. She doesn’t need to answer him. He must read it in the wrinkles of her own expression.

“You’re well enough now to help with the basic maintenance of the island,” he tells her. “Endurance will come back on its own. If that’s all you want, you don’t need this.” He opens his hands above the stack of coins. She looks at them, mismatched colors and uneven sizes.

“But,” he goes on, “if you ever want to improve— actually improve— you have to learn to let go of it.”

(The blade lodges in her neck. It fills her throat with blood. She can’t breathe, can’t speak, can’t see.)

“If you don’t…” Hinata shrugs. “Then don’t.”

She is seventeen, and Satou Yume’s skull shatters against a metal baseball bat before she can intervene. The day after it’s done, the young master tells her he feels better.

She is sixteen and about to die. She holds her chin up, but makes the mistake of looking over her shoulder when the young master screams.

She is nineteen, and every member of the main branch of the Kuzuryuu family is dead except for one. She helps him drag their bodies out into the garden, where they can be left for the crows.

(It was her responsibility to see him whole and unharmed.)

She stands up from the table. Hinata says nothing when she walks out the door.


	3. Chapter 3

The old building is cramped, dark, and dusty, stacked to the ceiling with boxes and choked with stale air. It was decrepit enough in the simulation, but in reality it’s nearly derelict; it creaks at night and groans in the wind. It’s the only central location with enough space to store all of their supplies, though, so that’s what it is: a shed.

He’s been the de facto owner of their inventory since the beginning. He’s organized. He’s good with numbers. He knows how to make things last, and when to cut things off.

(He’s also the only one without a vivid, visceral memory of the old dining hall. Hinata and Owari are the only ones besides him who can go inside without flinching. Hanamura won’t go within thirty feet of the front door.)

There’s a new shipment this week. It’s an assortment in a single crate: food, clothes, medical supplies. It's barely what they need. Naegi says it’s the best he can manage, with the rest of the Future Foundation breathing down his neck, but his best isn’t going to keep them alive. 

He cracks it open anyway. It’s all they’ve got.

He has to do all the re-sorting himself, to make sure everything is kept in its proper place. It takes him almost half the morning just to get through a quarter of it; the crate itself is barely organized, and he falls down the rabbit hole of sorting it there, instead of sending himself running all over the room.

Behind him, the double doors of the dining hall creak and rattle when they open.

Fuyuhiko lifts himself up, both hands braced on either side of the crate. “Hey!” he shouts over his shoulder. “That fucking door’s supposed to stay fucking locked!”

“I’m sorry,” Peko says behind him. “I didn’t realize.”

He twists, then scrambles to his feet. She’s standing in the hall just beyond the doorway, one hand on the edge of the frame, waiting for permission.

There’s a headache blooming between his eyes. “No, it’s…” He rubs at the spot. It doesn’t help. “Sorry. I thought you were Hinata.”

Her brow furrows.

“He’s always doing that,” he explains. He tosses one hand towards the door. “Picking the stupid lock. It’s a whole fuckin’ thing. He has fun, I guess, but I’m the one who always has to deal with Souda flipping out when he finds out.”

“I see,” she says. The door’s hinges whine again when she tugs on the handle. “Would you like me to leave?”

Souda would want him to kick her out. But it’s Souda who cares, not him, so: “It’s fine. C’mon in.” 

She does, taking a single step over the threshold and hovering there. She doesn’t say anything, but her eyes climb the stacks of boxes, from one end of the room to the other.

“Did you... need something?” he tries. “I’m gonna warn you right now, there ain’t much in here to spare.”

She shakes her head. “Sonia suggested there would be another shipment of supplies today,” she says. She’s looking straight at the crate he left open on the floor. “I came to see if you needed help unpacking it.”

He’s surprised. That’s a generous word for it. More importantly, he isn’t stupid.

They both know her schedule. They both know where she’s supposed to be right now. She refuses to look directly at him, only comes as close as just above his left shoulder when the silence gets too deep. 

He shoves both hands in his pockets so she can’t see his fists.

“Where’s Hinata?” he asks.

“He’s cleared me to work,” she answers.

“Peko—”

“Please.” Her voice cuts clear over his, sharp, clipped, and urgent. It’s more than he’s used to, more than she must be used to, because it startles silence out of both of them.

Her chin dips down. Her hands clench at her sides. She says, more quietly, “... I’d like to help.”

She shouldn’t be here. She should be getting better. The frustration boils in his chest, but then cuts off at his throat like trapped steam. He knows exactly whose neck he wants to wring, but he can’t think about it when she’s looking at the floor like that, like she’s in pain and he’s the only one who can give her relief.

“Fine,” he says on a heavy exhale, and she looks up at him, wary. “There’s- There’s something, yeah. C’mon, I’ll show you.”

They have an awkward standoff in the doorway. He doesn’t want to squeeze past her, but she only takes a single step back, and that doesn’t leave enough room for him to clear the threshold without at least brushing shoulders with her. 

Before, it wouldn’t have mattered; they always orbited each other so closely that he wouldn’t have even thought about it. Maybe she would have. Probably she would have. But that was how it always was: she paid attention, while he marched through life oblivious to his own bullshit.

Now he’s the one who hesitates, and he can’t pretend even to himself that she doesn’t notice. She takes another step back, and he slips by her into the hall.

He leads her back to what's left of the old building’s old kitchen. They gutted most of it: parts for Souda and space for Fuyuhiko. All that's left are the boxes and the freezer.

“The only things the side generator keeps running over here are the lights and this piece of shit freezer,” he tells her, when he flicks the lights on. They strain overhead, humming fluorescents. 

He pulls the switchblade from his back pocket to cut open one of the boxes. They’re all food, but only some of them are the freeze-dried stuff he’s concerned about. The ones he moved in here this morning are already starting to go damp at the corners.

When he looks up, Peko is staring at the knife, not at him.

“You good?” he asks.

Her eyes snap back to his face. “Yes,” she answers. “I have one question.”

He wrenches the box open, leftover sections of tape snapping. “Go for it.”

“Why do we keep perishable food at all?”

“Wish we didn’t,” he answers. “Naegi keeps sending ‘em. They’re frozen, but like I said, freezer’s a piece of shit so we can’t ration them properly. Oatmeal tastes like cardboard, but at least we can store it. I’ve been trying for months to get him to send us more of that and less of whatever this is.” He wriggles his way around the maze of storage to the freezer box. “... Don’t tell Hanamura I said that, else I’ll never hear the fucking end of it.”

“... I won’t.”

There's something… something, in her voice. Warmth, maybe, except even that feels like too strong a word. Understanding, or commiseration, or… something. It’s just a tinge, but it’s something.

He should feel better about it than he does. She has her hands folded in front of her, tightly enough that her knuckles are white, and that’s all he can think about. 

“So what we need to do,” he cracks the freezer open, and it doesn’t even fog in the warm air, the piece of junk, “is roll the stuff in here out so that Hanamura can cook it. Then,” he points to the open box on the floor, “this stuff needs to get packed in. Make sense?”

She nods.

“... It’s not the _most_ boring job I got, but it’s pretty close.”

“I don’t mind.”

She really doesn’t, he thinks. She looks calmer. He knows that being idle makes her anxious, but she wouldn’t have been idle otherwise. She would’ve been working toward something, it would have just been something for her instead of something for them.

Does that make it the right thing, if it’s what she wants to do?

“Okay,” he says. It’s awkward. She’s waiting for him before she does anything. “Then… I should get back, I guess.”

“Alright.”

“If you need anything, I’m just around the corner.”

“Thank you.”

Every muscle in his body and impulse in his brain and breath in his chest tells him not to leave her there alone. But none of that is for her; it’s all him, wanting to see her, hear her, be close to her. If it doesn’t help her, she doesn’t need it.

He turns around and walks out.

*

He sits with Hinata during lunch. It’s the best time to corner him; the fucker is slippery, but he always lingers after meals, long after everyone else has left. All Fuyuhiko has to do is linger, too, and wave off all the curious looks that get sent his way.

Peko is sitting on the other side of the lobby, with Souda and Owari. He saw her come in and saw them sit down, but he’s not watching them or anything. The two of them have bigger fish to fry, keeping Owari on track, and there’s a small, shameful part of him that doesn’t want her to know what he’s about to do. 

(She keeps looking over. He never looks back.)

Hinata works while he eats. He has two plates: one he devours without looking, and the other left untouched beside him. He acknowledges Fuyuhiko sitting down with a distracted, “Hey,” and nothing else.

Fuyuhiko doesn’t interrupt him. He just eats, and sets his plate aside when he’s done. 

He can be patient when he means to.

The others filter out as they finish. (Peko stares at him when she goes. She must know by now. He’s counting on her not abandoning Owari, and he’s right.) When the lobby is completely empty, he sits up on his elbows and contemplates slamming the lid of the laptop shut from this side.

Before he can make up his mind, Hinata tilts his head in his direction and says, “I gave Pekoyama a choice.” He taps through a series of complicated keyboard shortcuts without missing a beat. “She chose.” 

He doesn’t even look up from his screen.

Kudos to him for not being fucking coy about it, but the emotional dead zone is almost more grating than a runaround would have been. He’s not here to talk to Kamukura. If he’s all they’re stuck with now, then they’ve got bigger problems on the horizon than anything else before, and their problems are already pretty fucking big.

“Oh yeah?” he answers. “That’s really the excuse you wanna fucking lead with?”

“It’s the truth.”

He slams his hand on the table, and all the dishware jumps, rattling. Anything to get Hinata to _look_ at him. “That’s not the fucking _point,_ Hinata!”

Hinata stops. It feels like every day is more of a struggle to get his undivided attention, but this time he really, fully stops. His eyes lift from behind the laptop screen. He draws his hands away from the keyboard, and puts them in his lap.

He looks like he’s struggling to concentrate. “Sorry,” he says, voice blunted, and that’s Hinata. It is. Fuyuhiko cracks his knuckles against the table, and breathes in: one, two, three, four. “I’m listening.”

The rising anger in his throat collapses in on itself, substanceless. He has to cling to the dregs of it to keep it alive, fluttering pieces of indignation. Hinata won’t get off scot-free, not if he has a say in it, no matter how much of his frustration is self-directed.

“She—” He catches himself looking at the door, like Peko might be waiting there, listening to him make decisions for her. (But he's not. That's not what this is.) He drags himself back to focus. “She needs someone looking out for her, alright? She needs to know that it’s okay for her to spend time on herself. To- To get better. Right now all she’s got is you, so if you can't be assed to give a fuck, then we've got a problem.”

Hinata stares back at him.

“All she has is me,” he repeats.

His voice falls to a hiss. “Don’t even fucking start.”

“Kuzuryuu—”

“Don’t try to make this about me! We’re talking about _you,_ motherfucker.” 

The insult tears out of his throat, edged almost into a snarl, and it unearths the flickering ember of rage in his gut. He fans it, because he can. Because he wants to, maybe. It’s a familiar rush, and doesn’t that feel _better?_

“I don’t know who the fuck you think you are, but the rest of us aren’t your lab rats, you understand? I’m not your psychology experiment, so don’t fucking look at me like me being pissed at you is a new goddamn _data point._ You were supposed to be _helping_ her, asshole. You’re supposed to be helping _us!_ ”

Hinata listens. He weathers all of it, and doesn’t flinch.

Fuyuhiko coughs, his voice cracking. “Goddammit.” His throat is raw. It hurts to swallow. “Say _something._ ”

Hinata’s eyes flicker down. To the screen of his laptop, Fuyuhiko thinks at first, but— no, just to the tabletop, and the untouched plate beside him. 

“You’re wrong,” he says.

“Yeah?” Fuyuhiko spits. “Then let's hear it.”

The laptop cuts them off. It beeps, a loud, grating sound, and it doesn't stop.

Fuyuhiko recognizes it.

Whatever amount of direct attention he managed to wrangle out of Hinata evaporates. His eyes snap back to his screen. When the noise keeps on going, he scoops the laptop against his chest and stands up from the sofa.

He sticks in place. He looks at Fuyuhiko like he just remembered he was there. “There was a spike,” he says, like an excuse.

“Yeah, I'm not fucking deaf, dumbass,” Fuyuhiko answers. “Who is it?”

“I need to check.” He keeps switching back and forth, like he’s jumping across an invisible line between selves; he takes long steps toward the door, and then stops short again. “We’ll talk,” he says. “We will.”

The longer his brain churns, the more Hinata slips away. It doesn’t matter. No argument they need to have is more important than the others, anyway.

Fuyuhiko waves him off. “Just go.”

He does. Fuyuhiko waits alone in the lobby for long minutes after he’s gone.

One, two, three, four.

*

Hinata left the untouched lunch plate behind, so Fuyuhiko takes it upstairs to the restaurant. The steps sag under his weight, each one buckling a little more the closer he gets to the top. No one’s putting the effort in to maintain the patio. Not many of them spend much time up here, anymore.

Sonia does, though. 

She’s alone at one of the center tables, hands folded in front of her, staring at nothing. He stops at the top of the staircase and tests the waters: “Sonia.”

She doesn’t react or respond. Her eyes are flat and far away.

He could leave her alone, but this can’t keep happening, people skipping out on eating. It’s a waste of what supplies they have, and it isn’t like any of them get enough to eat as it is.

He crosses the rickety floorboards to her table.

(Don’t look.)

“Hey,” he tries again. “I brought you lunch.” 

She doesn’t move. One last try: he drops the plate on the table, from just high enough that it clatters near her fingertips.

The sound and the vibration snap her out of it, at least long enough for her to focus on what’s in front of her. “Oh,” she murmurs, and her eyes rise sluggishly to meet him. “Kuzuryuu-san. I appreciate the gesture, but—”

“We need to eat all this half-frozen shit Naegi keeps sending us,” he tells her. “It’ll go bad otherwise.”

She looks down, and for a second seems to struggle to recognize the green vegetables on her plate. She closes her eyes, takes a long breath in and a long breath out. “Yes,” she says finally, pale fingers curling around her fork. “You are right, of course. Thank you.”

He slides along the bench to sit across from her, his back braced against the edge of the table. The view from the restaurant out over the hotel is still decent, even though clouds are choking the sky again today. It’s too much to expect good weather to last, anymore.

(Don’t look.)

Food perks her up, or as much as can be expected. After a few quiet bites she asks, “Are you finished for today?” and when he looks over his shoulder, there’s a new shade of color in her skin.

“Ahead of schedule,” he answers. He looks back out at the gray streaks of clouds, and rolls resentment around on his tongue. It’s not enough to keep it down. “... Peko came and helped out this morning.” 

She’s quiet. He can hear her fork scraping against her plate like it’s scraping the inside of his skull. “... I feel I owe you an apology for that,” she says. “It was not my intention to surprise you. Pekoyama-san came to me, and I…”

“It’s fine,” he says. He tries to keep it from going flinty at the edges. It doesn’t work.

“I understand that the situation is complex. I should have been more considerate of your feelings.”

“I _said_ it’s _fine._ ”

“I see,” she answers softly. She doesn’t say anything else. Sound reduces to the scrape of her fork and the rush of the ocean in the distance. (Or maybe it’s the rush of blood in his ears. He isn’t sure, is never sure.) 

He glances at the mouth of the staircase.

(Don’t look.).

All he has to do is drop his eyes. It’s just a few feet from his left knee. Or, more accurately, it _isn’t_ a few feet from his left knee. The floorboards are dusty in that spot, but uniform; in the simulation, they’d stayed stained until the very end. Every time they came up for breakfast, someone had to step over it, the murky blood-red spot he left behind.

Of all the things for the simulation to erase, it’s almost the most fitting. Not one single drop of blood he spilled mattered in the end, for Koizumi or for Peko.

“I wish we could make use of this space more often,” Sonia says behind him, too gently. She must have caught him looking. “So much of it is unpleasant, but… There are good memories here, too.”

“We can’t keep following the same schedule we had in there,” he answers. She already knows it. It’s not the first time he’s reminded her. “It’d be fucking impossible for people to keep their heads on straight otherwise.”

“I know,” she says. “I only wish…”

She doesn’t finish her thought.

“Is that why you came up here?” he asks.

“No.” She breathes in deeply, and then amends: “Well, it was not the only reason.”

He debates saying something. It doesn’t always help, pointing things out. Everyone here knows where their wounds are. Having everyone else know too can just be salt, sometimes.

“... You’ve been out of it the last couple days,” he says eventually. It’s just an observation. She can do whatever she wants with it.

It takes her a minute or two to decide.

“Yes,” she says, under her breath. “I apologize for that. I know it is an… inopportune time, for you especially.”

“That’s not what I—”

“I know. But it is true, is it not?”

He doesn’t have anything to say to that.

“I have been thinking about Novoselic,” she goes on. “... In truth, I am always thinking about Novoselic. I count every day I am here and not there. Every day I cannot ease the strife I have caused, the pain, the uncertainty.” 

She breathes in sharply, rattling. He hears her lay her utensils down on her plate, in four clear rings of ceramic. 

“I wonder,” she murmurs, “how irresponsible is it of me to remain here?”

He looks at her. Her utensils are set over each other in a cross, and what’s left of her vegetables are lumped together on one side of her plate. Her eyes shine, turned down. 

The agreement keeping them all here isn’t binding, except by standards and loyalty.

“Hey,” he says. “You’re not thinking about…”

“No.” There’s sure-footed conviction in her voice, even as she scrubs the tears from the corners of her eyes. “I would never abandon my friends.” She won’t quite look at him, though. He’s seen her break down worse than this, but she still doesn’t like to show it. “… It is only a thought. I decided long ago that it is in my people’s best interest for me to be away. For now, at the very least.”

He swings his leg over the side of the bench, and twists around until he’s facing her. 

(There’s a lance through his gut like he’s tearing his stitches. There’s nothing there to tear. He clamps a hand over it anyway.)

“We’ll go back,” he tells her. “All of us, once we’re done here.” 

She nods. It’s tight, and she isn’t smiling, but she does reach for her utensils again. She chases the last few bites of her lunch, and almost finishes the whole plate. That’s fine. He’s learned to take _close enough_ over _not at all._

“... May I ask you something?” she asks when she’s just about done, contemplating the final bite.

“Sure,” he says

She lifts her eyes meaningfully. “It is… somewhat personal.”

“... Sure.”

“Pekoyama-san told me this morning that she had completed her physical therapy,” she starts. It’s soft, like she’s holding back a blow. “That was a lie, yes?” He stares at her, and her smile is apologetic. “Your voice carries.”

Peko didn't lie to him, not technically. He almost wishes she had. Then maybe he’d have a real reason to feel angry, instead of whatever this flimsy helplessness is.

“Yeah,” he answers. “Hinata cut her loose.”

Sonia nods once, sharp, like she’s accepting a judgement. “She does not trust me,” she says. “I cannot blame her, of course. She barely knows me. But…” She hesitates, and chooses her words. “She is… struggling, is she not?”

He doesn’t say anything. That seems to be answer enough.

“You know her better than any of us,” Sonia says. “If you have decided that the best way you can assist her is to be apart from her, then…” She isn't fast enough to catch the tears this time; they well and fall within seconds, soundless. She dabs them from her cheek with her sleeve. “Then… I understand. That is all I wish to say. Sometimes… sometimes what is necessary is also painful. Yes?”

He’s cold. The wind is quick today, and with the clouds as dark as they are, there isn’t much to make up the difference. He breathes: one, two, three, four.

(Don’t look.)

“Yeah.”

*

Their status meetings are starting to get cramped. Seats are turning into prime real estate, with all of them piled together on the lobby’s flimsy couches. Fuyuhiko waits for everyone else to sit down (Peko and Owari against the far wall, and Mioda tucked in the middle between Sonia and Hanamura) before he squeezes in on the end, next to Souda.

It’s tense and quiet, today. It always is when Hinata is the one running the meeting, instead of him or Sonia. They’ve been doing this long enough that they all know what it means.

It’s a light tension, at least. Suspense, not dread. They listen to the squeak of Hinata’s marker on Sonia’s whiteboard, and wait for the results.

He’s flipped the board to the other side, freshly erased, and is copying out neat lines of math equations. Fuyuhiko doesn’t understand the math any better than he did the first time, but he’s seen the numbers themselves enough to understand what most of them are for: at the top right, amplitudes of brain waves; below that, Hinata’s progress piecing the avatar back together; to the left of that, a mess of variables taking into account height, weight, dosages, upload time, and two or three more he hasn’t figured out yet.

“Who is it this time?” Hanamura asks, when the picture starts to come together.

Hinata doesn’t even look over his shoulder. He writes out the recovery timeline on the far left edge of the board (one month, twelve days, ten hours) and answers, “Saionji.”

The tension snaps. It always breaks out over them differently; there’s no getting around that. A few seats over, Mioda lets out a shaky breath.

Fuyuhiko’s chest constricts.

It had to happen eventually. They’d just gotten lucky so far, with the ones waking up being able to at least tolerate and cooperate with each other. Roll the dice so many times and eventually it has to come up snake eyes. (And this isn’t even that, he thinks; it could easily be worse, in so many ways worse.)

The others are starting to stare: some at him, some at Mioda, the rest at Peko. When he steals a glance at her, she’s looking forward, not quite at the whiteboard, expression impassive.

“That’s gotta change how we handle the reintegration stuff,” he says, since no one else will.

Everyone glances at each other.

“Does it, though?” Souda asks. “I mean, sure, it isn’t like you guys were on great terms before- before.” He still struggles to say it, even now. He swallows and skips over it. “But you’re gonna be in the same room eventually. Isn’t taking you out of the equation right from the beginning just gonna make stuff worse?”

“I agree with Kuzuryuu-san,” Sonia counters. It’s the strongest her voice has been in days. “The reintegration process is about stabilization. We have no way of knowing what Saionji-san’s mental state will be when she wakes up. If we can prevent undue stress, then…”

He counts his inhale. One, two, three, four.

“Ibuki agrees too,” Mioda says under her breath.

“Well, I think Souda’s on the right track,” Owari says. “We can’t talk some big game about moving on and stuff and then not follow through, y’know?”

Exhale. One, two, three, four.

“Y-Yes, but there’s no need to force it right away, right? Is there?” Hanamura’s voice trembles into a high register. “It’s... better to let these things happen at their own pace! Isn’t it?”

“We ain’t gonna put _you_ in a room with them. That’s what we’re saying! It’s a different thing than it’d be with Tsumiki, or with you, or Pekoyama.”

He drags his nails against his scalp.

“In all fairness, we should consider all potential impacts of—”

“This isn’t a fucking _vote,_ ” he says— only maybe he shouts it, because Souda jumps in his seat, and the rest of the room goes taut with silence.

Hinata turns back to the whiteboard. He's the only one at the front today.

“It’s Kuzuryuu’s choice,” he says, and when Hinata says it, it’s the final word. “If he doesn’t want to be involved in Saionji’s reintegration, that’s up to him.”

They move on. They talk logistics, setting up the hospital room and allocating watch duty. It’s the fourth time now they’ve had this conversation; it’s getting to the point where it’s almost smooth, almost clockwork. He answers all of Hinata’s questions about the lifespan of their supplies. He doesn’t remember what the answers were, afterwards.

The others clear out when they’re done. Souda is one of the last to get up from his seat, and he leaves a hesitant pat on Fuyuhiko’s shoulder when he does. 

Hinata takes the open seat. “We weren’t finished,” he says, when Fuyuhiko looks up at him.

He opens his laptop on the coffee table, angled just enough so Fuyuhiko can see. It’s all code and graphs and numbers; the longer he stares at them, the more they look like gibberish. There’s a jagged line graph on the right, dated through today; it has deep valleys that rise to unimpressive peaks, then plateau out. 

The gains seem too modest to be a graph of Saionji’s progress. When he looks at the tab at the bottom of the screen, the label reads PEKOYAMA. 

“I’m done with letting other people dictate our lives for us,” Hinata says, “and I refuse to do it to anyone else. If someone isn’t ready, they aren’t ready. I won’t force any of you to do anything. That includes Pekoyama.” His voice shakes. He’s struggling, trying to hold on to some damaged scraps of self. Fuyuhiko’s seen him do it before, if not for a while. “And it includes you, too.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better?” he answers. “You- tracking her, like some kind of experiment?” It falls flat, phrased more vindictive than he feels.

Hinata knows. He doesn’t seem offended, anyway. He draws the computer back into his lap. “You were wrong,” he says. “But not about me.” He’s staring again, but it’s softer, sympathetic. That’s Hinata. “About her.”

“Don’t try to tell me what—”

“What are you afraid of, Kuzuryuu?” Hinata says over him. “That she won’t choose to go back on her own?”

He thinks, _Why would she?_

It kills his childish rejoinder, right in his throat.

“I told you before,” Hinata says, when he doesn’t answer. “I have confidence in her.” 

The same knee-jerk retort rises to his tongue. This time he doesn’t swallow it. “Are you saying I don’t?”

Hinata just looks at him. “Don’t you?”

_Of course I do._

That’s the right answer. It jumps to the front of his mind without confusion or debate. He should say it. He can say it. He wants to say it. 

It withers there, in his silence.

*

When he comes out of the hotel, Peko and Owari are sitting together at the edge of the pool. Owari is sprawled out on the deck, legs dangling over the edge, and Peko sits tall beside her with her legs crossed, staring into the basin.

Owari points her chin at him. “See?” she says. “Told ya.”

Peko turns to look. She’s still wearing her hair down, long and wavy in the humidity. He knows it bothers her like that, how it gets in her face and in her way, how it clings to the back of her neck, how it gets too hot in the sun. He remembers the whites of her knuckles, clenched tight around each other.

“Hey,” he says. “Can we talk?” 

Owari says, “Sure,” before Peko can open her mouth. She spreads her arms out and closes her eyes. “But it woulda been easier if everybody was still here, y’know.”

“Owari.” She cracks one eye open. “I meant me and Peko.” She squints. “Alone.” 

“Well, you coulda said _that,_ too.”

Peko has turned back to the pool. She’s so still, statuesque in a bad way, refusing to budge against the wind or Owari or herself.

“Only if that’s okay with you, Peko,” he says.

In the few, quiet seconds before she answers, he realizes he never actually expected her to say no.

She says, “Yes.”

Owari leaves with an exaggerated twist of her spine, and he takes her spot on the edge of the pool. There’s a little bit of rainwater collected at the bottom, grimy with pollution and dark algae. It’s the most it’ll probably ever fill again; the lack of maintenance has left the basin warped and unreliable.

“You were inside a long time,” she says.

“Yeah. Had some shit I needed to sort out with Hinata. It’s fine now.”

“I see.” 

He can’t see her well; she’s to his right, sitting on an even plane with him. He doesn’t have the peripheral vision on that side anymore to pick up any cues from her besides her movement and the sound of her breathing. He only has the words in his head, and that.

It makes it easier, almost. The words don’t evaporate the moment he reaches for them, the way they did in her hospital room weeks ago.

“I’m worried about you,” he says.

He leaves a gap for her, but she doesn’t fill it. She’s so still he could pretend she isn’t even there, if he wanted. 

All he can do is keep going.

“I didn’t come out here to tell you what to do, or- or to get on some fucking high horse about what’s right or wrong or whatever. I just… I want you to know how I- how I feel.” The phrase sets his heart rattling against his ribcage, even though he doesn’t— not like _that._ “I want you to get better. I want you to _feel_ better. And I think working with Hinata is the only way you’re gonna get there.”

He stops again. He swallows to control the trembling breath in his throat, and leaves a gap for her. She doesn’t fill it.

“... You don’t have to tell me why you stopped, if you don’t want to. You don’t have to tell me anything, if you don’t want to.”

Wind skips across the pool deck. It whistles through the railing of the empty restaurant above them. “I’m sorry,” she answers softly.

Disappointment rushes in, an entitled weight in his chest. What does he even have to be disappointed about? It isn’t like she would have told him before. Enforced closeness isn’t closeness.

“You don’t have to be sorry, either,” he says. “That’s the whole point.”

There’s so much more to say. All of it burns behind his teeth, pleas and questions and explanations. He wants to let it all out. He wants to grab her by both hands and show her everything he thinks she deserves. That’s the wrong approach, he knows it is. He’s already seen how it goes wrong, and he still wants to do it anyway.

He’s never been much for moderation. It used to be a point of pride: all in or all out, never half-assed. Some yappy corner of his mind still zeroes in on it; he came in lukewarm, and now he’s only made things worse.

But he drew the line for himself. He’s stepped to it, and now he has to stop.

He sits with her a while longer. (Just a while longer.) The silence isn’t overwhelming, because the island isn’t ever really silent; sand grass rustles, bugs chirp, and the ocean is always there, rolling soft static in the distance. 

“You’re different,” she murmurs.

It feels like a door creaking open. It lifts the weight off his chest, but also blurs the clear boundary of his line in the sand. When he turns his head to see her better, there’s a gentle curve to her spine, all the way up to where her neck is bent to look into the basin. 

“Yeah,” he says, and then hedges, “Kind of.” It’s too much to say he’s completely changed. The old attitude still clings to him, sometimes, like ugly flecks of shed skin on the belly of a lizard. “... Is that weird?”

She doesn’t answer right away. He watches her roll her shoulders back, and then she says, “No,” too carefully to be natural.

It makes him laugh, almost. As much as a soundless puff of air counts, anyway. “Really?”

“... Perhaps a little,” she admits. “Yes.”

She lifts her eyes out of the pool basin, enough to look at him sideways. There’s something uncertain about it, embarrassed, maybe shy. It sets a molten ache deep in his chest.

He steps over his line, one foot into the door she left open.

“Maybe,” he says, mouth dry, “this can be the chance we need.”

She shifts to look at him properly. Flickers of emotion slip in between twitches of her expression: confusion along her browline, caution in her frown, curiosity around her eyes.

“There’s a lot I still need to understand, too,” he says. “About- about you. I know I can’t act like you and me could ever, you know, start over, but…” His throat constricts until it hurts. He can’t look at her looking at him anymore. “If it’s still something you want, then I… I’m… ” 

She touches him. 

It’s barely anything, trembling and uncertain fingers laid over his clenched fist, but it sucks the air right out of his chest. Her hand is warm, a little clammy from the humidity. 

“Yes,” she says, almost too soft to hear. “I… I think so. I do want that.”

His head spins. All his body parts feel disjointed, and he has to search for the right muscles to relax to get his fingers to uncurl. When he does, she fills the spaces left behind in slow, stilted increments: her fingers fit over his knuckles, her thumb curls into his palm.

He stares at the clumsy fit of their hands together until it blurs.

“Peko, I...” It comes out weak and watery. He latches onto the irrational need to talk faster, before he can’t anymore. “I’m really- _really_ glad you’re here.”

He sniffles. He hiccups, like a child forgetting to breathe through his tantrum. It’s ridiculous that the tears still come on both sides, hot and painful, even though his right socket has been empty and useless for months (years).

“I missed you,” he manages, with the breath he has left. “Fuck, I missed you so much.”

She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to. 

She holds his hand, and lets him cry.


	4. Chapter 4

She is sixteen.

Zipping herself into the surfboard case is a simple, practical maneuver. She has hidden herself this way before, in tighter spaces and under more pressing circumstances. Saionji won’t wake for at least another ten minutes. The young master has always been meticulous.

The anesthetic used to subdue Saionji was his. The candy now cupped in Peko's left hand is his, as well. The letters, the bat, the staged crime scene. It is all his plan, and she is only another piece in it.

(The flimsy plastic mask laid out next to Koizumi’s corpse is not his. It is hers, brought from the supermarket.)

She doesn’t need to close her eyes. The case is well-made and zips completely; there is no stray light peeking through the cracks. She does anyway, for the sensation of it, calming and centering. The most difficult part is still approaching, and she must be prepared for it. She has been a sword, and now she must be a shield.

(He told her not to come, and she did not listen.)

She can hear the ocean clearly, waves spilling over the sand just beyond the walls of the beach house. She lets the sound absorb her focus, and ties her breathing to it: slow rush in, slow rush out.

She is a tool.

She has only ever done what her young master wished of her.

It is impossible for her to will anything, when hers is only an extension of his.

(Please let him be safe.)

Saionji wakes, in groggy increments. She staggers to her feet, breath quickening into panic, and fumbles with the door of the closet. It swings open. The smell of Koizumi’s blood has begun to grow putrid in the heat of the room.

She screams.

Peko’s heart beats an unsteady rhythm in her chest. It isn’t painful, but it is uncomfortable. She curls her body forward, chest held in, and she is not in the surfboard case at all. She is upright, knelt on the floor of her cottage, hands folded in her lap. It is early morning, her time for meditation. She is alone.

Who screams?

She is sixteen, and the scream is Saionji’s. She is twenty-one, and the scream is her own. To her ears, they sound the same. She isn’t sure.

Someone knocks on the door.

The sound is harsh. It jostles the pieces of herself back down from wherever she lost hold of them, and they reassemble themselves in her skull, jagged and ill-fitting. She flattens one hand over her mouth.

(The blade carved through half of her outer ear, clipped her glasses off her face, and sliced through the ends of her bangs on one side.)

“Yo, Pekoyama.” Owari’s voice is clear and serious. She only waits a handful of seconds for a response. “I know you’re in there. I ain’t goin’ anywhere, so you might as well come out.”

Peko finds her feet. She goes to the door; Owari is waiting for her on the other side, arms folded into sharp points across her chest. Despite Peko and Souda’s best efforts, she has lost weight.

“C’mon,” she says. “I got what you need.”

*

Owari’s exercise routine is comprehensive: half cardio, half flexibility and strength training. She practices it three times a day, one session immediately after every meal, each lasting an hour or more. 

(Peko always suspected it was unhealthy. “You wanna try to convince her, be my guest,” Souda told her once. “She wouldn’t listen to me.”

She hadn’t listened to Peko, either.)

It’s too early for this to be part of her regular schedule, but Owari leads her down to the beach anyway. She walks in silence, arms behind her head, and Peko follows three steps behind her.

“We’re going to miss breakfast,” Peko says.

“Eh, It’s fine. Not like it's goin’ anywhere.”

“Owari.”

She groans. “You’re worryin’ too much! This ain’t about that, okay?” She stops short in the sand, long enough for Peko to catch up to her. “Do you want my help or not?”

She doesn’t, not particularly. “If we don’t meet with Souda the way we agreed, then—”

Owari doesn’t listen. She jogs a short distance down the beach, kicks her shoes off, and squares her feet in the sand. She cuts wide grooves in with her heels, and Peko understands: it’s to give herself better traction and leverage in an initial attack. She curls both hands into loose fists and lifts them to her chin.

Peko says, “No.”

Owari must have not even considered the possibility of that response. “What?” she demands. “Why?!”

“There’s no reason to,” Peko answers, and leaves it at that. “We should leave. Souda will be looking for us by now.”

Owari doesn’t move. “Bullshit,” she says. “You think that’s gonna work on me? You’re a damn liar, Pekoyama.”

Peko’s legs burn, just from standing.

(The blade split her left knee from the back, entered through the joint and shattered her patella on the exit.)

“None of these guys get it,” Owari goes on. “Hinata and Sonia and Kuzuryuu… They all want it to be in your head. But it’s not. It ain’t the same for you and me.” Her eyes drop to the sand, and her forehead creases with concentration. She struggles to find the words. “It’s… You wake up, and it’s like nothing _works_ anymore, y’know? It can’t be you, ‘cause this ain’t your body. _You’re_ not… you. You get what I’m saying, right?”

A breeze rushes in from the ocean. It picks at Peko’s loose hair, tossing it around her shoulders and into her face. Her hands shake when she reaches up to push it back behind her ears. The right one is still there, flexible and whole, and it feels like it belongs to someone else.

“Yes,” she answers.

Owari nods. It’s subtle, small; Peko would never call her nervous. She digs her heels in deeper. “So fight me already.”

Peko looks down at her feet. In the time they’ve been talking, she has already sunk into _gedan._ Her palms itch. Without a weapon, Owari will have an easy advantage over her from the start.

She shores herself up. She digs her feet into the sand, sneakers and all, and raises her fists.

Owari whoops, and bounces on her heels. “Al _right!_ ” Her fists clench, bones and tendons standing out beneath her skin. “That’s what I’m talking about! Let’s _do_ this.”

There is no formal beginning to the match, no referee or whistle or bow between opponents. There is nothing formal about Owari at all, only her bare feet and bent knees, ready to spring. All of Peko’s knowledge of her fighting style comes from what few scattered, mismatched memories she has; she can only be sure that Owari is instinctive, improvisational, and unpredictable.

Anticipation beats a quick, familiar rhythm in her chest.

Owari’s patience breaks first. She leaps, and whatever effect her malnutrition has had on her body, its impact on her speed has been minor to negligible. It's a wild, direct charge; she clears the stretch of sand between them in three long strides, and aims her elbow at Peko’s ribs.

Peko’s returning block comes up a fraction of a second too late. She catches the hit with the flat of her forearm, but not soon enough; the force overpowers her foothold in the sand, and sends her sliding back on her heels. 

Owari presses her advantage. She is small, but not fragile; she plants her feet, and lays the full brunt of her weight against Peko’s unsteady balance. It forces Peko to retreat, before she falls; she slides back and to the side, which leaves her left flank wide open. When Owari swings her arm down for the obvious strike, Peko grabs her by the wrist.

It’s a miscalculation, a flawed instinct that ignores the current limitations of her body. She manages to grab hold, but her grip is weak, and her fingers shake. Owari slips away from her, and drops to knock her legs out from under her.

She sees the maneuver before it comes. In that split second, she knows exactly what to do: she can spring backwards, dodge the sweep and procure some distance, then close back in while Owari is recovering. It is a sound, reasonable strategy. 

However, planning her response is not the problem; the problem is that she thinks about it at all. Her body doesn’t simply _respond_ the way it should, the way it used to. Owari drops, her sweeping leg connects with the backs of Peko’s heels, Peko's protesting knees give in, and she goes down.

She hits the sand on her back. It knocks air out of her chest and bright spots into her vision. The sand is rough and cold under her elbows. The sky is murky and dark above her head.

The threat bears down on her. There is blood in the sand already, and it’s his, spilled from the end of her blade. The Future Foundation has them cornered, surrounded. There is a whirr of old gears and grinding metal, all around her. She wants to seize something by the throat and crush it with her bare hands. She wants every punishing blow to come to her, through her, so that he can be spared. (Please let him be safe.) She wants more desperately than she has wanted anything in her entire life.

She scrambles to find purchase on her trembling elbows, her head too heavy on her neck. Her vision swims. Her lungs burn. (The blade sinks into her side and hangs there, loose, the weight of the hilt dragging it against the bottom edge of the wound.) She will not fail here, she cannot, _as long as there is breath in her body_ —

Arms lock around her shoulders and hoist her upright in the sand. Owari’s voice is in her ear, out of breath, “Pekoyama! Get it together! C’mon!”

(It scrambles in her head, like she’s been plunged underwater. She is— sixteen. She is nineteen. She is twenty-one?)

She screams. She thrashes. Owari’s grip doesn’t break.

“I got you,” she says, over and over. “I got you.”

*

They are late to breakfast. 

Preparations for Saionji’s initial recovery are beginning to grow hectic. They are three weeks into their six week timeline, and the hotel lobby is frequently empty, or close to it. Most of the others take their breakfast to work with them, or skip it entirely.

Today, only Souda and Hanamura are still there when they arrive.

Souda leaps from his seat by the window. He charges them, hands outstretched and flailing. “What the _hell,_ you guys,” he hisses. “I was freaking out! I was about to blow a frickin’ gasket!”

Owari pulls herself away. “You’re always freaking out,” she complains. “We’re here to eat, aren’t we? So let’s eat!”

“Don’t give me that! You were supposed to be here almost an hour ago! I thought I was gonna have to call an alarm and everything!”

“This isn’t necessary,” Peko says.

“But—”

“Owari always planned to come to breakfast,” she says. “She was assisting me with something this morning.” He glares, but it’s mostly panic and fear. His hands shake so much he has to wring them. “It’s fine, Souda.”

Her upper back aches from the angle she hit the ground. There is a headache curling at the back of her skull, and the beginnings of twin bruises forming on each shoulder, beneath her sleeves. If nothing else, that pain is tangible. It is logical. It is real.

“C’mon!” Owari says. “What do we got left, huh?”

Breakfast is oatmeal, the same as most days. Hanamura has to warm some of it back up for them, which makes the consistency thick and sluggish. It is what it is.

“You’re really not letting me do my best work like this,” he sighs, when Owari snatches up the bowls. There are only two, one for each of them.

Souda sits with them, even though he must have already eaten. He draws his feet up into the seat, his knees under his chin. He’s at least calmed enough to not be shouting, anymore. 

“I convinced Kuzuryuu to take his back,” he tells her, after a minute or two. “I didn’t want him to get all bent out of shape over nothing. If- y’know, if—”

“I understand,” she says. “... Thank you.”

“Don’t be thanking me yet.” He clenches and clasps his hands, then tucks them in the pits of his knees when they won’t stop shaking. “We still gotta get through today without everything going to shit. I haven’t been back out there since Hinata discharged you, you know. I dunno what we’re gonna find.”

She gets halfway through her breakfast before the remainder starts to look unappealing. She scoops up another bite, and balances her spoon against the rim of the bowl.

“Remember,” Souda is saying, “leave the door locked. Don’t open it for anybody, no matter who it is. Even if it’s Hinata, or- or me, or anybody. I don’t care what Kuzuryuu says. Just wait until he comes back with the key.”

“I understand,” Peko says.

Owari eats her entire bowl, for the first time in weeks. She scrapes the edges of it with her spoon when she’s finished.

*

The front door of the old building is locked today. 

(Hinata has spent almost all of the past three weeks in the simulation room, bent over the main computer; she imagines there isn’t time for him to spend picking open the lock on the door. It’s for the best. Souda is too agitated already for there to be more laid on top of it.)

She knocks.

Fuyuhiko looks tired, when he swings the door open for her. His hair is mussed on one side, and the angle of the early morning light curves shadows under his eyes. “Hey,” he says, like he’s surprised to see her. “Uh, hey. C’mon in, we’re almost ready to go.”

“Souda wanted me to tell you he would be late this morning,” she says, when she steps past him into the hall. “He needed time to go back to his cottage.”

He shuts the door behind her. The deadbolt snaps into place more forcefully than it needs to. “Great,” he says, rattling the knob. “Fucking of course he did.”

“It isn’t his fault. Owari and I were late as well.”

He looks up at her, and then back down. “Yeah. I, uh. I noticed that.” He tests the knob again, and then the deadbolt a third time. “Was- everything okay? With Owari, I mean.”

“It was fine,” she answers. “She was helping me with something, that was all.”

It’s a transparent lie. Even without him looking at her, she knows that. But he does eventually, and when he turns to face her the lines of exhaustion in his face are more pronounced. The light in the hallway is limited; it will always make the shadows look more extreme.

“Right,” he says.

It’s a nice thought, getting to know one another again. 

In practice, it is uncomfortable.

“So, hey.” He pulls the walkie-talkie off of the back of his belt. “Since Souda’s taking his sweet-ass time, you and me should sync up. Then we can get out of here as soon as he decides to make a fuckin’ appearance.” 

She’s unfamiliar with the settings of the walkie-talkie; she keeps hers on her for emergencies, but has only used it once or twice in the time she’s had it. He shows her a fat dial on the top edge of his receiver, and twists it around to select channel six. 

“So we can talk without anybody sticking their nose in,” he tells her. “And so that nobody else has to listen to us talk about how many bottles of meds there are all day.”

She copies him. Her fingers tremble on the dial. He doesn’t say anything about it, only waits the extra seconds for her.

When she’s ready, he holds his receiver up to his mouth and tests the connection. “How’s that?” he says, in crackling stereo.

His test is clear enough. She doesn’t need to, but she lifts her own receiver anyway, thumb on the button. His eyes crinkle at the corners in a way that warms her chest, grooves in his face that lighten it instead of darken it. 

“Good,” she answers, and her voice reflects back at her, staticy in his hands.

*

The plan is straightforward: Souda assesses the hospital’s electronics, Fuyuhiko assesses the supplies, and Peko remains in the old building to relay stocking information for either or both. 

“Remember,” Souda tells her, “keep the door _locked._ ”

“And try not to go bored out of your skull,” Fuyuhiko says. “I’ll buzz you when we get there.”

They leave, and she waits, alone in the old dining hall.

Owari was right: the smell is musty, a little sweet with wood rot. It comes mostly from age and water damage to the building, as far as she can tell, and not any of the supplies. The storage itself is done with care, precision, and a somewhat eclectic method of organization.

She understands why the others may struggle to follow it. It's a non-standard, value-based system, rather than one based on type, name, or size. It’s designed to be confusing— or rather, common sense to those familiar with it, and inscrutable to everyone else. It was a hallmark of Kuzuryuu Daichi, the young master's great-great-grandfather.

Peko recognizes it immediately. 

(She was instructed to learn it for an assignment concerning an indiscrete senior member employed at one of the clan's storage facilities. In truth she learned it much earlier than that, from the young master’s bookcases.)

He has repurposed it for the needs of the island, but the general concepts are the same. It only takes her a few minutes to parse the structure he’s designed, which leaves her with at least twenty minutes more to wait before he and Souda arrive at the hospital.

The whole building groans under the weight of the wind.

(The blade sunk into her right shoulder, perpendicular to the bone, then gouged backwards to her scapula. The tip broke the skin of her chest. She could see it, gleaming dark with her own blood.)

She counts left on the shelf of pain medications: nine over, and three down. When she nudges between two of the boxes there, her fingers find a skinny paper bag, the mouth crumpled and folded over. It’s just over a quarter full with almonds, tossed in cinnamon sugar.

Something swells behind her sternum.

She is seventeen, and he sneaks sweets when no one else will see but her, when it’s just the two of them, alone in his dorm room.

She is sixteen, and he waits on the beach while the rest of the class swims in the ocean, his hair gleaming beneath the tropical sun.

She is nineteen, and he looks at her— 

The feeling skews cold and nauseating in her chest. 

She refolds the lip of the bag more securely shut, and puts it back where she found it.

In the back of the room is a row of boxes, the brothers and sisters of the one left at the foot of her bed. They are not hidden, but they are squirreled away on a less-prioritized end of the young master’s organizational structure. They’re in alphabetical order: Koizumi, Komaeda, Nidai, Saionji, Tanaka, Togami, Tsumiki.

At the end, laid haphazardly aside, is an eighth: Kuzuryuu.

He tried to fold it closed, but the flaps are flimsy with age and use, and have since slipped open. The contents are still cast in shadow, from this distance, but the light catches on something metallic, gleaming gold. 

(He’d had an heirloom revolver that he carried with him always, plated in gold from grip to barrel. He’d stepped over his father’s corpse to get to it. He’d shown it to her, smiling, soaked in blood. “Finally.”)

She doesn’t touch the box. It isn’t hers to interfere with. She turns her back, and then she is nineteen, feeling the warm swell in her chest when he looks at her, a splatter of hours-old bloodspray on his face, drunk on the despair she brings him.

Some days it is her defiance that does it. Others it is her obedience. His tastes change with the moment, the temperature, the direction of the wind, but she always knows what they are. She knows him, and he knows her. They are always in perfect, crumbling sync.

Some nights, she bends over him while he sleeps. She hovers the edge of her blade next to his throat, and considers the ramifications of killing him, not for the first time and not for the last.

It licks at her, blurs the edges of her vision, just the idea. To feel failure spill warm over her fingers. For the sword to turn against its wielder, that final, unspeakable betrayal, and then simply clatter into the dust, useless, unwanted, forgotten— her heart races. It’s indescribable.

Once, he wakes up before she can decide. His good eye flutters open, bleary and unfocused, and then he says her name, soft on her cheek. He tilts his chin back to give her more room.

He wants it, too, that surge of despair. If she dug her blade down half an inch, less, they could fall into it together. For a split second, they could give each other what only they can give, and it would be— everything.

The receiver on her belt crackles. 

“Peko,” he says. “You ready?”

Her fingers are shaking. She fumbles with the button too many times, and it crackles again, “Peko?”

She manages it. The connection opens, and she breathes in. “I’m here. What do you need?”

*

The work itself is simple. He tells her what the hospital is currently running low on, she reports back what they have available, and between them they try to plan how much to allocate to support Saionji without running their reserves too low.

He is thorough. She’s never known him not to be. It isn’t only a matter of numbers, supply in and supply out; he weighs the relative needs of the people awake, takes into account likes and dislikes, and tries to predict the patterns of Naegi’s shipments— months of experience she has no concept of. He has spent a lot of time with his classmates.

“Hang on,” he tells her more than once. “I gotta switch off this channel for a second.” He asks the others questions, Sonia and Hanamura and, without much success, Hinata.

She thinks he may be used to doing the tabulation by himself. At one point he opens the connection and keeps it for several minutes without stopping.

“We should do more than just refill the pain meds. They didn’t help you or Hanamura much, but with Saionji it’s gotta be different, right? I mean- maybe. I don’t fuckin’ know. I need to ask Hinata, I guess, but it’s sure as shit not gonna be a bad thing if we have more meds than less. 

“We should double-check the clothes we have in storage, too. If the plain stuff’s all we got, whatever, but she can’t go around trying to wear a kimono on day one. Better if we can head that off at the pass. Pillows, too. The ones we got over there are shit, but the ones here are even more shit, might as well at least swap them out.”

She follows the wall of the shelf while he talks, and marks off the corners of boxes with a permanent marker: pain medication, changes of clothes, spare pillows and blankets.

“Yo, Souda,” he calls, static surging around his volume, “what did you say you needed again? I know I packed some of the shit you cleaned up last month. If we’ve got enough to have some left over, you should just fix it up now. Whatever the fuck it is. I don’t want these things crapping out while she’s still in here.”

“Dude,” Souda says in the background. “You might w—” His voice clips at the end when the connection cuts out.

A moment later, it cuts back in. “Shit,” the young master says. “Sorry, Peko. I wasn’t... I can start over.”

“What does Souda need to repair the hospital equipment?” she asks. “There is a box of spare capacitors and a box of stripped copper wire.”

“Oh,” he says. “Uh.”

“It’s the capacitors, Pekoyama!” Souda calls. “This guy always forgets!”

“Understood.” She marks the box with her marker, and starts compiling her formal list. “Is there anything else?”

“Damn.” Even filtered through the walkie-talkie, the young master’s voice is warm. She cups the receiver in both hands, alone in the old dining hall. “Alright, then. Yeah, I got more for you. You ready?”

She is.

*

The young master comes back to the old building alone, at the end of the day. Souda found more wear on the hospital equipment than they anticipated, and stayed behind to evaluate and repair it.

“I’m gonna hang back here a while longer,” he tells her, when she meets him at the front door. He has a tall, red thermos tucked into the crook of his elbow. “If I can get this wrapped up today it’ll put us a whole week ahead of schedule.”

The sun is low behind him. The last amounts of warm color in the sky are beginning to bleed away; it’ll be dark sooner than later. 

“Is there anything I can help with?” she asks.

His face changes: a downward pull of his mouth, a bunching around his eyes. She doesn’t know what it means. “You’ve been stuck in this dump all day,” he says. “You can take a break, you know. You don’t have to stick around.”

She thinks about the cottage, the darkness, the silence. She thinks about the box still at the foot of her bed, with _Pekoyama_ written on it in neat, blocky letters. 

“I’d like to,” she says.

The suggestion makes him uncomfortable. She’s learned to read that, at least, in the slight hunch of his shoulders. Still, he says, “Alright. Let’s do it.”

They start by pulling all the supplies they identified during the day. It takes time; the cache is meant to last Saionji, Hinata, and anyone on watch rotation the entire time she’s hospitalized. They have the approximate timeline of her long-term recovery Hinata provided, but even that is susceptible to variation.

(Hinata had told her that her own stint in the hospital was much longer than projected. There were some variables he couldn’t account for before someone was awake, he said. Even still, there had been supplies left over.)

They lay all the supplies out on the floor, to be counted and packed. She kneels when they’re ready, but the young master hovers, next to the shelf of plain t-shirts.

“Hang on,” he says. “I got one more thing I need.”

He counts out the same pattern she did on the opposite shelf: nine over, and three down. He reaches between the stacks, and pulls out a single packet of instant coffee.

“Hospital’s the easiest place to get hot water,” he explains, not quite meeting her gaze. “And we’re gonna be here for a while, so...”

“I understand,” she says. “It’s convenient.”

He sits cross-legged on the floor with her and unscrews the lid of his thermos. “At first I thought this was why Hinata kept breaking in here,” he tells her. “You should see him whenever we get more in. Bastard would demolish a month’s worth of the stuff in a day if I let him.”

She watches him tap the packet directly into the water. It dissipates in a rich, dark cloud. “Is that why it’s hidden?”

“Maybe at first.” He screws the top back on and swirls it carefully, one-handed. “He’s never taken any, though. And I don’t think it’s because I managed to pull a fast one on him.” He shrugs. “Guess I’m just used to having it there now.”

“I see.”

He’s patient with the coffee. He lets it steep, and doesn’t shake it. When it’s been long enough, he holds the thermos out to her. “You can have some,” he says. “I mean, if you want. I only have the one, uh, thermos, so we’d have to- to share, but…”

She looks down at it, and then back up at him.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She takes it from him; the metal is warm enough that it radiates up into her wrists. “Thank you.”

The exchange is complete before she’s even fully processed his question. He raises his eyebrows, and— he has been making a concerted effort this entire day. The onus is on her to do the same.

“I thought…” It’s always been a delicate subject. She searches for the correct phrasing. “I thought there might be an additional step,” she decides. “That’s all.”

“It’s instant, Peko,” he says. “Ain’t that many steps.”

“Yes, but…” She unscrews the stopper, and the smell wafts up to her, warm and, more importantly, bitter. “It’s… black.”

The confusion on his face smooths into understanding. He bends to inspect the open box of pain medication in front of him, but not before he flushes, warmth in his cheeks. “So? So what? I like black coffee.”

It’s there again, the old, familiar swell in her chest. “I see,” she says, as delicately as she can manage. “I made an assumption, I apologize.”

His nose wrinkles distastefully. “Don’t apologize for something stupid like that, I…” He sighs. “Fuck, who am I kidding? I’m not drinking that shit for the flavor.” He holds a hand out to her. “Can I have some?”

She lets him have it. He takes a quick gulp, even though it must still be too hot. “You should rest if you’re tired,” she says. “I made a list of everything you asked for. I can finish packing.”

“That’s not gonna happen, whether I’m here or not,” he answers. “Might as well use it for something.”

He holds the thermos back out to her, and she takes it, just to hold. She doesn’t need the caffeine, but the warmth of it soothes an ache deep in her forearms. 

(She tried to catch herself on her hands when she fell this morning, and was unsuccessful. The blade stabbed down from above and split the bones of her wrist, pinning her arm to the ground. She isn’t sure which it is.)

He starts to tap through the box, a loose count of bottles, and the circles under his eyes look deeper and darker now than they did this morning. He must have been sleeping poorly for days. The wrongness of it strikes at her gut. 

“Is it Saionji?” she asks.

He looks at her, but it’s brief, flickering. He’s quiet long enough that she begins to think she overstepped. “No,” he answers finally. Then: “Well, sort of. It’s not just her.”

“I think I understand,” she says. “The uncertainty is…”

None of the words that come to mind seem to adequately fill the blank. Most of them feel like she’s belittling what he’s going through, words like 'difficult' or 'challenging' or 'worrisome.'

“Shitty,” he offers.

“Yes,” she says. “That.”

He doesn’t laugh. It’s just a quick exhale, a puff of air through his nose, but it eases something in her all the same.

“I don’t know what’ll happen,” he says. “She probably isn’t gonna want anything to do with me. Nobody’s gonna blame her for that. I’m sure as shit not. But you…”

He stops. The words hang between them, ominous and heavy.

She cuts them down for him. “I was punished,” she says. “You were not.”

“Peko.”

“It’s how Saionji will see it.”

“ _No,_ that’s not what I—”

He turns his face away. He inhales deeply, and exhales slowly. He’s gone so rigid she could almost mistake it for physical pain.

For her, the memory is either distant and intangible, projected on some far away screen, or otherwise it is _here,_ it is _her,_ invasive and overwhelming. But he has always held things so closely, felt them so intensely, more than anyone she has ever known. There is no detached lens for him to view it with.

Even a child would never make a mistake so simple.

“I’m sorry,” she says softly.

“... It’s fine,” he says. His voice is hoarse. “Come on. We gotta get this thing packed.”

They do. They work together in silence, counting, sorting, and packing supplies into sets to be taken back out to the hospital. It is methodical, repetitive work, but never to the point where her mind can retreat and her muscles can take over. She is too aware of him across from her, hunched and anxious. 

Halfway through, he stops.

When she looks up, his head is low. He has a package of neatly-folded clothes in his lap, tucked inside a sealed plastic bag. He clenches it in both hands until it crackles and whines under his nails.

His shoulders are trembling. 

She sits up on her knees, and reaches over; she lays one hand on the package, and the other over his wrist. His head snaps up, and she looks into his face, his skin ashen and his eyes red-rimmed. He’s tired. He’s been sleeping poorly. The punishment was hers, but the burden still weighs on him, heavy and unrelenting.

She wants to take it away from him. It is her responsibility. It always has been.

His grip on the bag loosens; she eases it out of his hands, and sets it aside. 

He says, “Peko?” so softly that it slides like a feather down her spine, ticklish and strange.

She should explain herself, but the words aren’t there. She doesn’t know what the explanation is. Instead she only looks at him, and he only looks back.

The moment is like a polishing cloth, swept across the front of her mind. She is smooth, silent, without ripples. There is no pain, no intrusion. Her muscles find their voices again, the most familiar they’ve ever been, and they draw her forward, a boat drawn by the stream.

She braces herself against the floor, and her wrists and elbows hold steady under her weight. Her breathing slows, even as her heart races. (She is quieter this way.) Close enough, and she can see where his iris is hazel and where it is green. Closer, and the line of her nose aligns with his, a hairpin in a lock, lifted open from the outside.

“What are you doing?” he whispers. 

She stops. The sound demands her mind, and her mind demands her attention: on the quavering quality of his voice, the tense lines in his face, the tightness of his body language. 

It’s a flinch. 

He’s afraid. 

The realization crashes like a stone into still water.

“I’m sorry.” Her chin jerks back. “I don’t know what came over me, I—”

“Peko,” he whispers, and it’s the same. Quavering. Afraid. It pulls her back down, through the noise. “Please.”

He hasn’t pushed her away. He hasn’t touched her at all. They’re still close, her partially in his space. He looks up at her, stricken, trembling with barely-restrained emotion, and she can only be honest: “I was going to kiss you.”

His breath fails him. He sucks in another. “Why?” he manages, strained, like it’s yanked from his throat.

Why?

It had felt correct. It had felt like nothing at all. She searches for the right words to describe the blank, purposeful feeling she craves so much, and finds that she can’t, now that it’s again just out of reach. She’s reminded of Owari, struggling to articulate the discomforting disconnect between her body and her mind.

She can only be honest. “I don’t know.”

It isn’t a satisfactory answer. She hadn’t expected it to be. She can see his indecision in the rapid flicker of his gaze across her face. “You don’t have to do this,” he tells her. “Just because I… Before, I…”

He wishes it didn’t happen. Therefore, it did not happen. She still thinks about it, though, how it was abrupt and clumsy and warm, how he had tasted a bit like salt from the ocean. She had felt so numb and he had felt so much; for a split second it had been like a flood finding equilibrium. He had been calm, sure, soothed, if only for that moment. 

She wants that for him again.

“I don’t have to,” she agrees, and stays where she is.

His other eye squeezes shut. He swallows, throat bobbing. 

“... Do you want me to stop?” she asks.

He doesn’t look up at her again. His brow pinches down, and then he whispers, “No.”

The calm, still canvas of her mind is gone. It’s replaced by the wild beating of her heart and the uncertain churn of her thoughts. She isn’t sure what the angle should be, or what she should do with her hands, if anything. She can feel the little breath he takes and holds, when she leans in.

She grounds herself to the floor, nails curling against hardwood. She cants her head right, to best accommodate his bad eye. She stretches over the final inch, and touches her lips to his.

It’s brief, trembling, a little cold. 

He lets out his breath, a slow exhale that resolves into her name, soft against her cheek. It draws her down, or pulls him up; her head is so cloudy and the distance so small that she can’t be certain if it’s either, or both. 

They kiss again, and it’s firm, steady, warm.

He’s so warm. Just the feel of him this close chases the chill from her bones. He presses forward, mouth hard against hers, desperation and stress and anxiety— then softer, melting, like catharsis. 

She can do this. She can be the thing that soothes his aches and calms his heart. She’ll do it gladly. She would scatter all his negative emotions against the surface of her if it meant giving him a moment of relief.

The young master’s lips part from hers. She feels them curve only because she is so close, nothing but a breath of space between them. It’s the first ghost of a genuine smile he’s had since she met him again, and it burns like a bright, glowing candle in her chest.

She can be what he needs.


	5. Chapter 5

Saionji wakes up screaming.

The pod isn’t even open yet. He can’t see much from where he’s standing, just the green glow of the lights and the backs of Hinata and Sonia’s heads, but he can _hear_ it. Even muffled behind the glass, it turns his stomach. It’s guttural and raw and wheezing. He knows what people afraid to die sound like.

There are dull thuds from inside the pod. Souda breaks forward, and Fuyuhiko has to grab the back of his shirt to keep him in place. None of them are supposed to move unless Hinata signals for it, and right now Hinata is steady as stone.

“Cool it,” he says. “Give ‘em room.”

(Souda and Owari are the only ones set for backup today. Hinata benched him before he even had to ask, and it’s shameful what a relief it was.)

Souda dislodges him by windmilling his elbows. “Are you kidding me?” he says, his voice rocketing to an unsteady volume. “Are you listening to this?! Something could be really wrong! Something could’ve detached late or heated up too fast or—”

There’s a hiss and a click. Hinata and Sonia lift the lid together, and Saionji’s voice shrieks into sharp, painful clarity.

“Don’t touch me! Get away, you stupid bitch! Don’t touch me! _Don’t touch me!_ ”

She’s thrashing. He can hear her hitting the edges of the pod, knees and elbows and head. Hinata steps back, enough to give Sonia room to step forward: hands outstretched, palms-down.

“Saionji-san, please, you are going to hurt yourself like this! We only wish to help! There is no need to be afraid!”

“No,” Saionji sobs, broken and gasping. “No. No, no, _no!_ ”

Sonia yelps. There’s a smack, and a scuffle. “Saionji-san, it is alright! Please, just—”

He sees her then, a mass of stringy blonde hair flipped over the right edge of the pod. She’s trying to get out. She flings her entire upper body over the side, and when Sonia tries to grab her, she kicks and screams and loses her grip. She goes sprawling on the floor with a _thud_ and a wretched cry. 

Mioda walks out. It happens so fast that he barely sees her, but maybe he doesn’t have to; he can picture her in his head, with her fingers all tangled up in her necklace. Hanamura scrambles up to follow her, and the heavy door groans when it swings shut behind them.

Saionji keeps screaming from the floor.

She doesn’t have any concept of where her limbs start and where they end; watching her struggle to stand up is like watching a marionette having its strings plucked. Her elbows keep jerking up and falling back down, slamming her wrists and knuckles at unnatural angles against the linoleum.

“Owari,” Hinata says, finally. “Souda.”

All of them were waiting for it. They both surge forward, and Saionji’s screaming turns to sobbing when they crowd around her. They have to do it. They have to hold her still. It’s as much about protecting her from herself as it is anything else.

They end up having to carry her out. It takes all four of them to do it. Sonia has a bright red gash on the side of her face when she passes.

He and Peko hold the doors open.

She waits with him, afterwards, outside the facility with the sun beating down on them. She doesn’t need to stand so close, enough that he can feel her like a magnet, dragging on his skin, but she does. She doesn’t say anything. She just stands there, and waits for him.

He doesn’t know what they’re doing. He doesn’t know what this is. All he knows is that it feels delicate and pristine, like it might permanently mar the surface if he touches it with his bare hands.

“Are you ready?” he asks, after however long it’s been. His own voice sounds alien in his mouth. “We need to keep things running. Mioda’s not gonna be able to do it.”

She nods, and walks back with him.

*

He, Peko, and Hanamura spend a week keeping things afloat. They’re at the bare minimum of standards: making sure everyone is accounted for at all times, and making sure they all get food. They rotate spending time with Mioda, so that she’s never alone for too long.

It’s Hanamura’s turn that afternoon, so Peko and Fuyuhiko sit together in the hotel lobby decoding the latest messages from the Future Foundation. The two of them are the least useless at doing it, and it still takes forever; the messages are always getting longer and the key is constantly changing. It’s supposed to be secure, so that the messages don’t get picked up by a colleague and blow the whole lid, but that doesn’t make doing it any less of a pain.

Sonia shows up before they’re even halfway done. It’s a bizarre time for her to be back, the middle of the afternoon; the first few steps of the reintegration process she put together usually take up entire days. There’s a grim set of her face that tilts his mind at the start of a dark, spiraling path. 

Peko raises her head to greet her. He focuses on the next line of Naegi’s message.

“Pardon me, Pekoyama-san,” Sonia says. “May I speak with Kuzuryuu-san alone for a moment?”

He looks up, too. She’s trying to smile, even if she’s not doing a very good job of it. The cut on her cheek has faded to a thin, shiny patch of healing skin. 

“Of course,” Peko says. She sets her pages aside, and he doesn’t understand why until she follows it up with, “I can step outside.”

His stomach rolls. He hits his knees on the coffee table trying to stand up before her. “No,” he says, too quick. He clears his throat. “We can go outside. Don’t worry about it, Peko.”

Peko doesn’t argue, but she does watch him cross the lobby before she reaches for her pages again. 

“It won’t take long,” Sonia assures her, and follows him out onto the porch outside.

“I have a favor to ask of you,” she tells him. She’s stiff, serious, and formal, and for a second he thinks maybe they didn’t go far enough. “I will warn you first that it is unpleasant, and you are well within your rights to refuse. I have spent all of this week trying to find some other recourse, but…” She hugs her arms against herself, and away from all the others, in the plain, raw sunlight, she finally looks tired. “We are at a point now where options are becoming fewer. I told Hinata-san I thought it would be foolish to not at least give you the choice, and he agreed.”

“Not like we had a ton of options to start out with,” he says. “Just tell me what it is.”

She sighs. “Saionji-san has requested that you be present at any and all future reintegration meetings had with her.”

It’s like being on a highway and slamming on the brakes. His brain had already been barrelling down full-speed at a whole host of different worst-case scenarios, and this was nowhere near any of them. Everything grinds to a halt.

“... What?”

“Perhaps that is not the right way to put it. More like… she has demanded it.” Sonia is good enough at what she does to not look away, but she does lower her chin, her lips pursing. “It is… an ultimatum, of sorts.”

It starts to sink in. It spins a headache up behind his left temple and sets his heart beating painfully fast. “What the fuck? _Why?_ ”

“I do not know. She refuses to provide her reasoning, though I suspect she is… frightened.”

“That’s why I _didn’t_ go in the fucking first place.”

“Yes, but… After speaking with her a few times already, I believe I can understand her logic, somewhat.” She looks at the tinted windows in the face of the hotel. “She is isolated. She is weak, and in pain. Her safety is only contingent on the rest of us keeping our promises not to harm her, promises that were, of course, broken in the past. I believe she finds your absence unsettling, in that respect.”

He turns his back on her. He has to, while his brain is catching up and splintering out. He’s going to have to turn right around and go back to decoding after this. He breathes in: one, two, three, four.

“I do not expect an answer now,” she says softly. “If you feel it is outside the realm of your own personal health and safety, I beg you to refuse. But if not…”

He breathes out: one, two, three, four. “I’ll think about it.”

*

“Will you go?” Peko asks.

They walk together on the beach that evening, just before the sun goes down. It’s supposed to be a patrol, but there’s nothing to find out here except howling wind and the occasional oxygen-starved fish. It’s private, though. Secluded. It matters to him that the others not know about their… _this,_ whatever it is, for whatever reason.

He stops in the sand, and rocks back on his heels until it starts to get into his shoes, cold and grainy. The view of the ocean is still shit. There’s no getting around that. But everything is improved at least a little bit by a sunset; the crests of the waves gleam orange and red in the fading sunlight.

“Yeah,” he answers.

“Saionji likely doesn’t intend for it to be productive.”

She’s not wrong, but she’s also missing the point. It’s that gap again, the one they haven’t managed to bridge yet. They’ve only been throwing clumsy lines across and hoping some of them catch.

He tries to toss another. “I fucked up,” he says. “With Tsumiki.” 

It’s worth it to clarify which fuckup. There are a lot of them, when it comes to Saionji. Peko’s heard the story of the simulation already, but only the objective, sanitized version they give everyone. She’s heard other parts from him, painful parts, but not this.

“I was there with her, the whole time. I should’ve noticed, or… I don’t fucking know. _Anything._ I let her split up from me, the day it happened. I let her go, and she had the chance to pull her stupid magic trick with Saionji’s body. What kind of dumbass does that during a fucking killing game?”

The sun is setting fast. She’s watching the water, lit from one side, brightness sliding abruptly into darkness. She doesn’t look at him when she says, “She would have killed you, too.”

Maybe she would have. Monokuma never cared about enforcing rules until they were broken, and the one limiting the number of victims didn’t exist until after they’d already found two. If he’d figured it out earlier, confronted her, tried to bring her in, he doubts she would have hesitated.

He likes to think it wouldn’t have been that simple, though. He wants to say he wouldn’t have let Tsumiki kill him without a fight. He wants to be able to tell Peko that the life she gave him meant more to him than that, because it does, now. 

Back then, though, that line had been so thin.

“Look,” he says instead. “What I’m saying is… Yeah, maybe Saionji needs a punching bag. If that’s what I gotta be, I’ll be it. I owe her that much.” The sun is sucking the warmth down with it, and wind skips in to fill the space. He shivers. “I’d owe it to any of you guys. Whatever it takes. That’s what we said, when we woke up.”

She looks over, then. She meets his gaze head-on. She looks at him like that, all vibrating intensity and coded emotions, and he can’t believe he ever thought he properly understood her. There isn’t more to her now than there was before. It’s just before he was too self-involved to see it.

She takes one step forward, and then another. She crosses the boundary of his personal space, from friendly into intimate. “May I?” she murmurs. She always asks first, now.

He swallows. He nods.

There’s nothing soft about her, he’s found out; she’s all chapped lips, sharp angles, and dry skin. He figures he can’t be any better, so it’s not like he has room to complain, but it still makes things rougher than he thinks either of them intend it to be, whenever they get this close. 

She sets one hand against his shoulder, just at the tips of her fingers, and folds the other behind her back. It’s still a little awkward, when she kisses him, and a little uncoordinated. They haven’t nailed it all the way down, yet.

It isn’t soft, but it is careful, and gentle. He finds the courage this time to brush her cheek, the edge of his thumb tracing the line of her cheekbone, and her sigh against his mouth makes the unsteadiness worse. She wobbles out of alignment and bumps his cheek with her nose.

When he looks, he catches the tail-end of her wince.

He can feel when she starts to pull back. He turns his brush into a touch before he can help himself, cupping her cheek to hold her in place. “Hey,” he whispers. “You can relax, you know.” 

Her expression doesn’t change, except for maybe a frown line or two around her eyes. He flounders. “I just mean… Here.” He reaches blindly for her hand. He could look down, but they’re still so close, and he doesn’t want to break whatever it is keeping them tethered together. 

She doesn’t look down either, not even when his thumb slides against the inside of her wrist. “You can, um...”

It’s easier just to show her: he guides her hand up, and then presses it to his chest, over his heart. That seems proper. Romantic. Her fingers spread flat and curl in, nails catching on a seam of his button-down. She must be able to feel the abrupt stutter against his ribs.

She whispers, “ _Oh,_ ” like the idea of touching him is a revelation. 

She brings her other hand up, and curls them both around the edges of his collar. The tips of her thumbs are cold against his chest, and maybe that’s what makes her tuck them under the edge of his shirt, chasing warmth. Her grip is loose and jumpy, like he might dislodge her just from breathing.

He doesn’t want to push her. He’s not sure where the line is between tactful and patronizing. But she stops there, not moving on but also not letting go, and her eyes are intense, focused on a spot near his collarbone. She stays like that for a long time.

“What?” he prompts, as gently as he can manage.

Her gaze flickers up, and then back down. “Would it be alright with you if…” She cuts herself off and starts again. “Could I…” And again. “I thought that…”

“It’s fine,” he says. “Whatever it is. Really.”

She frowns, but she doesn’t push back. When he gives her another few seconds, she starts to make a trek in slow, staggered increments: first her palm slides inside his collar, against his throat, then up to his jaw, then back to his ear. 

He doesn’t know why that wasn’t clue enough already. (It’s the feeling of her thumb tracing the shell of his ear, maybe, up and around like a nervous tic.) She touches the tips of her fingers to the side of his head— and then she takes the dive, tracing the uneven lines where his hair has started to grow back in, back and forth.

It makes him feel like a dog, scratched behind the ears for a job well done. _That’s fine,_ his brain responds, _she loves dogs,_ and he has to hide his little burst of laughter into the crook of her neck.

Her fingers jump away. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Was that uncomfortable?”

He catches her wrist in one hand. “What’d I say?” he answers, setting her palm back against the side of his head. “It’s fine.” He can feel his face getting warm. Trying to will it away only makes it worse. “I mean, it- it’s not like it feels bad, or anything.”

Her other hand flutters against his shoulder.

“Peko. Relax.”

She smooths the edge of her thumb back against his scalp. It’s more thoughtful than before. Her eyes are on his face now, but they still have that same intensity, determined and unsure at the same time.

She whispers, “May I?” again, so quick he almost doesn’t catch it, snuck out on the tail end of a breath.

She’s already so close. Enough that when he whispers, “Yeah,” the gap between them is already almost gone.

She closes it, and if he’s honest, it’s better the second time. They’re closer, more comfortable, at a better angle. He lets one hand touch her waist. Her nails curl into his hair. She’s still so angular, poking him in the shoulder, and it’s only getting colder the closer evening edges to night, but he thinks he could sink right here in the sand and be just fine.

When they come back up, the sun is gone.

*

The little hospital room looks exactly the same. There’s no reason for it not to, he was just here setting it up a couple weeks ago, but it’s jarring anyway. The sheets are a fresh set in the same color. The same wrinkled plastic daisy Peko had when she was here is still set in the same jar on the bedside table. 

Saionji is sitting up in the bed, long hair loose over her shoulders. She’s taller than he is now, childish features lengthened into something almost mature, and even though he’s been reminding himself about it for months, it still feels weird to see the new (old) shape of her face.

She smiles when she sees him, the grin etching across her face like it’s being drawn there. “Well, well,” she chirps. “Look who finally decided to show his face! I’m impressed. I bet it was cozy in that hole you crawled into.”

“Saionji-san,” Sonia warns.

“What? I’m as happy as you are. Now we might actually get somewhere.” Saionji’s eyes are hard and glittering, even when she bounces like a little kid on the mattress. “So, so? What are we waiting for?”

Sonia turns to look at him. “Just do it,” he tells her. “Let’s get this over with.”

There’s only one chair. Sonia takes it, this time, while the rest of them hang back by the walls. They agreed after Mioda that no one should try to sit on the bed while there’s someone in it, even if they’re relaxed to start. 

He missed the recap, apparently. Sonia starts with the overall structure of their days, and how tasks are allocated. She talks about their status meetings, how people opt-out of some tasks, and how the structure changes when another classmate comes out of the simulation. Saionji isn’t very animated while she listens, and he makes the mistake of assuming it’s because she’s calm.

“However, I want to emphasize that at this moment in time, you are not expected to perform any regular maintenance duties. Your focus, as well as Hinata-san’s, will be on your recovery.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Saionji says, and there’s a familiar razor-edge to her tone that twists up at the top of his spine. “That’s all whatever. What _I_ want to know is, what are you idiots doing to keep the rest of us safe?”

“We cannot predict every scenario,” Sonia answers, seamless, “but we were brought to this island in part due to its remote nature. It would be incredibly difficult for anyone to launch a full scale assault against us, and nearly impossible to do so without alerting us beforehand. Our contacts in the Future Foundation are also working tirelessly to—”

“Blah, blah. I’m not talking about that,” Saionji complains. “I’m talking about _them._ ”

He knows it’s coming. He’s not stupid. She has to sort of swing her arm up and around to get it to cooperate with her, but she still manages to level a finger at him, right at the center of his chest.

“Kuzuryuu-san is no danger to anyone,” Sonia says, and that, more than anything, is what makes him look at the floor. “I and anyone else in this room would happily vouch for him.”

Owari puts her hand on his shoulder and squeezes once. Saionji laughs.

“Oh, please. Don’t give me that power of friendship crap. I can’t believe you even let scum like him and Hanamura walk around. Are you stupid or something? Or do you think that just because you ‘won,’ nothing bad could ever happen to you?”

Sonia doesn’t falter, even the slightest bit. She’s better at this than he is. “We have all made our mistakes, Saionji-san,” she says. “No one here is without blame, and that is precisely why we must grow together. I understand your anxiety, but—”

It’s like a switch. Like that, Saionji loses her sugary sweet charm. “You don’t understand _anything,_ ” she growls. “Perfect little miss princess giving orders from on high. You’re loving this, aren’t you?”

“Hey,” Owari barks. “She’s doing all of this for you, alright? We all are. So—”

“Shut up,” Saionji snarls. She’s trying to grab the sheets of the bed in both fists, but she only manages to paw at them. “No one cares about your dumbass opinion, understand? You’re even more useless than she is. So stand back, and _shut up._ ”

Sonia lifts one hand, palm out. “Everyone, _please._ ” She leans forward, elbows on her knees, and lowers her voice. “You are absolutely right, Saionji-san. None of us here can empathize with what you are going through. If you like, we can ask Mioda-san if she would be comfortable being included, or—”

“Or who? Hanamura? _Pekoyama?_ ” She’s been waiting for the opportunity. He knows as soon as she looks at him. “That’s right, how could I forget? He’s even got his _lapdog_ here with him now, and not a single one of you even cares!”

Hinata’s eyes slide in his direction. It’s supposed to be a signal, Fuyuhiko knows that. _Stand down._ Go outside. Take a breath. Count if he needs to.

He can’t. It’s out of his mouth at the same rate it comes into his brain: “What the fuck did you call her?”

“Whoa,” Souda says. “Hey, maybe we should—”

The switch flips back, but this time the transition doesn’t go all the way through. Saionji leans forward, delighted and hateful all at once. “Look who finally grew a spine!” she sings. “I called her a _dog,_ shit-for-brains, because that’s what she _is._ What, are you gonna sic her on me now, too? Like how you did to Mahiru-chan?”

“ _Saionji-san_ —”

She claps both hands against her cheeks. “Oh my god, look at his face! You’re not still hung up on her, are you? You get how that’s, like, the creepiest and skeeviest thing ever, right? I can’t _believe_ you’d stoop that low.” She laughs, lofty and piercing. “Oh, wait! No, I totally can!”

“Hey, come on—”

“Ugh, it’s so _gross!_ How are the rest of you numbskulls not seeing this? I bet she’d put a collar on herself if he’d let her. I bet you’re secretly into nasty stuff like that, huh, Kuzuryuu?” 

He has a knife in his back pocket.

It’s over as soon as the thought crosses his mind. 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!”

“Kuzuryuu, hey!”

Saionji screams. Later she’ll act like it was fake, and probably she planned for it to be, but he’s standing over her right now, looking into her face, and all that shrinking fear is real. He’s seen it before. He’s relished in it before.

Doesn’t that feel _better?_

He doesn’t get any further than that. He doesn’t even get the knife out. Owari hooks her arms under his shoulders and drags him backwards on his heels before he can.

There’s a commotion. The plastic chair clatters to the floor, and Sonia is on her feet. “That is _enough!_ ” she shouts. It registers through his haze that her cheeks are shiny. “We will get nowhere with all this in-fighting! It must stop!”

That’s what brings the silence back into the room. It opens up space in his head, unravels the knot until he remembers where he is and what he’s supposed to be doing. Hinata and Souda are staring at him. Sonia has her hands over her face, and Saionji is crying. Owari still has him locked up in her hold, straining the muscles of his shoulders.

He doesn’t thrash. He holds both hands up and lets the rest of him go limp. “I’m good,” he says, and it’s only then that he realizes he’s panting for breath. “It’s fine.”

“Yeah?” Owari asks behind him.

“Yeah.”

She lets him go. His knees wobble under his weight, and his hands are shaking when he reaches for the door handle.

“Pathetic,” Saionji spits at his back, her voice thick with tears. “Some things never change.”

*

Hinata and Souda follow him out. They catch up to him on the road before the bridge, where the wind whips in from the sea. Souda lunges at him, catches him by the shoulder, and spins him around.

“What the hell was that?” he shouts. “You totally frickin’ lost it in there!”

Fuyuhiko shakes his hand off. “I know, alright? I _know._ ”

“No! I don’t think you do!” Souda is trembling with emotion, jabbing a finger in his face, and for once all his stupid paranoia is finally, finally valid. “Saionji’s a bitch, I get it, but that was way over the line, man! She’s in a hospital bed, for crying out loud. Who knows what could’ve happened if Owari hadn’t picked you off?!”

He doesn’t know. He has no idea. That’s the worst part of it, how he can still feel it like static at the edges of his mind, blind rage and vicious satisfaction. He wants to believe he would’ve gotten ahold of himself before anything escalated. The way his head is throbbing, he can’t.

He shoves his hands into his pockets, and finds his switchblade. He watches the color drain from Souda’s face when he holds it out between them. 

“Take it.”

“Dude…”

“Goddammit, Souda, _take it._ ”

He does. He takes it, still trembling, and puts it into the front pocket of his jumpsuit. 

“I shouldn’t come to any more of these,” Fuyuhiko says. “No matter what kinda fucking _ultimatums_ she wants to give.”

“Right,” Souda manages. “Yeah, yeah, right. I’ll… I’ll tell Miss Sonia.”

Hinata is just standing there, watching. He’s always worse, right after someone wakes up. He spends weeks sitting alone in the dark simulation room with his clunky main computer, and when he comes out of it, he’s not himself. 

(They try to stave it off. The four of them do rotations to sit with him, talk with him, bring him food and changes of clothes and whatever else. If it helps at all, it’s fucking hard to tell. He barely talks, and by the end of it he’s always the same: blank, still, cold.)

He cuts to the quick of it. There’s no inflection in his voice at all when he asks, “Are you going to tell us now?”

Fuyuhiko feels his heart constrict.

“Uh, what?” Souda asks. He looks at Hinata first, and then his eyes slowly slide right. “Tell us what?”

“Something happened between him and Pekoyama,” Hinata answers, when Fuyuhiko doesn’t. “He’s been wanting to talk about it for weeks. Right, Kuzuryuu?”

It’s infuriating how someone can manage to be so fucking smug without even trying. Hinata would never have broached the topic like this: high stress, no empathy, while the wind screams around them. 

“Fuck you,” Fuyuhiko spits. “Why don’t _you_ tell the fucking story, huh? Since you apparently know the whole goddamn thing.”

“I don’t,” Hinata says. “That’s why I’m asking.”

“Bullshit.”

“I don’t,” he says again. “I can only get the whole story from you and Pekoyama.”

That’s bullshit. It isn’t like what happened was mysterious, or complex, or even completely unexpected. All Kamukura would need to put the facts together is some data points from the two of them set on the proper timeline. The only nuances he would miss are the parts he wouldn’t care about: their relationship, their feelings, the personal impact on their lives.

Fuyuhiko scrubs both hands over his face.

“C’mon, man,” Souda says quietly. “Let us help.”

He looks at Souda, and only at Souda. He turns his shoulders enough to put Hinata behind his bad eye. “The day we did the hospital inventory, you stayed behind, remember?” He nods. “I went back, but I wasn’t by myself. Peko and I were together most of the night.”

It doesn’t click right away. Souda rolls his eyes. “So? I knew all that already. You guys built up some big story and—” He gets there. His expression morphs into something between shock and revulsion. “Wait, _wait._ You’re not saying... You didn’t... In our _supply_ room—”

“I kissed her, idiot. Don’t be fucking disgusting.”

“You’re the one being all weird and vague! Don’t blame me for needing some frickin’ clarification!”

“It wasn’t only the one time,” Hinata says, “was it?”

Fuyuhiko looks at his feet. His shoes and pant legs are already caked in loose red dust, just from standing in the wind. Not answering would probably be an answer on its own, but he’s already sick enough of himself. 

“No.”

“So, you’re dating,” Souda says. “Or, together. Or something.”

“Or something,” he confirms. Awkward kisses they barely talk about don’t count as dates, and _together_ makes it sound like something they took time to agree on. Put like that, even _or something_ sounds like too decent a term for it.

Silence grates against his ears. Souda keeps sneaking glances sideways at Hinata, arms crossed over his chest, but Hinata doesn’t interject. It takes less than thirty seconds for Souda to finally crack.

“... Sorry,” he says, “but I don’t get it. I mean, I get why Saionji would’ve pissed you off, maybe, but… isn’t this a good thing? Like, we all knew this was coming, right? Didn’t we?” He swings his arm out. “Back me up, Hinata.”

Hinata looks at the sky.

“Look, what I’m _saying_ is, if it’s what you want, and it’s what she wants, then where’s the problem?”

He thinks, Where _is_ the problem?, and then grinds his knuckles against his temples before the thought can bury itself too deep. The problem is _that,_ literally that, letting himself be that comfortable and complacent, even for a second.

He’s done nothing but take, and she’s done nothing but give. He’s been taking from her since the day he was born, hand over fist, whether he realized it or not. He can throw blame wherever he wants, at the clan, at his parents, at Enoshima Junko, but it doesn’t change anything. There’s no excuse.

“It’s not that simple,” he says. “It’s- It’s never been that fucking _simple,_ okay?”

“But why not? As long as Pekoyama’s into it, it’s fine, right? Why’s it gotta be more complicated than that?”

(“The tool with a heart is the killer!” Monokuma sings.)

“Because!” He wishes he was better with words. The usual ones bounce up to his tongue— _it fucking isn’t,_ and _I’m a piece of shit,_ and _goddammit will you just fucking listen_ — and they’ve never been more useless. “It’s… I’m…”

“Because you think Saionji’s right,” Hinata fills in, flat and without judgment. “You think you’re taking advantage of her.”

(He survived only because she didn’t.)

“No way,” Souda laughs. “He’s not that kinda guy. Saionji was just sayin’ that stuff to get under his skin. Right, Kuzuryuu?” He looks over, and he must see something in Fuyuhiko’s face, because his confidence cracks. “... Right?”

His ears are ringing. It rises up like a wave in his throat, all of it. He couldn’t stop it even if he wanted to.

“What if it’s not possible?” he blurts. “What if- What if it’s just fucking impossible for us to ever be— equal? Really, actually, _equal._ We’ve been like this since we were _babies._ How am I supposed to unlearn shit like that? What- What if I can’t? And if I can’t, how the fuck is she supposed to, if I’m still walking around doing whatever the fuck I want?

“I… I can’t do that to her. I won’t. I should want to never see her again if it means she can finally just- just be _her,_ for once in her entire fucking _life,_ but…” His breath comes in sharp. “I can’t do that, either. She just came back, I- I can’t.”

He chokes himself to a stop. The silence crashes back in, grinding him down to his skull.

“What am I supposed to do?”

Neither of them have an answer. Souda is looking at his feet. Even Hinata, always full of fucking answers, full to the brim of every talent Hope’s Peak could shove into his brain, only stares back at him.

*

He should go straight back to his cottage. He needs to lock himself in there and not come out until his goddamn head is on fucking straight. He’s done it before, in the early days, when everything was still like kicked up sediment in his skull. It’ll help. He should do that.

He doesn’t do that.

She picked her same cottage from the simulation. He doesn’t know why. It’s separated from the rest of them, on the other side of the dividing line. Maybe she’s just trying to find something familiar. Maybe she wants to be isolated. Maybe she doesn’t want the extra stress of being in close quarters with them. Maybe she thinks she deserves it.

He knocks and keeps knocking. (The doorbells don’t work anymore. Souda explained to him why, but he doesn’t remember.) He doesn’t know how long he knocks until the door swings open.

He manages, “Hi,” and nothing else.

“Hello.”

She opens the door wider; for him, he thinks immediately, and then immediately wants to bash his own face in for that kind of blind fucking arrogance. He looks down, and his sneakers are still dusty and red. He’ll track all kinds of shit into her cottage like this.

“Is everything alright?” she asks.

He refocuses on her face. He can see her better now that his eye is adjusting to the shadows cast by the buildings.

“... Would you like to come in?” she asks.

“No,” he answers. “I look like I just came out of a fucking dust bowl. I don’t wanna make you have to clean.”

“I don’t mind.”

“No,” he says again.

She nods, and steps out onto the tiny porch with him instead. For a second, he can see past her into the cottage’s front room.

It’s barren. The same two boxes are on the floor, exactly where he remembers them being the last time he was here, months ago. She hasn’t unpacked either of them. He thinks probably she hasn’t opened them at all. He can see a sliver of his own handwriting from here; he’d had to take a break between packing the box and labeling it because his hands had been shaking too much to write neatly.

Peko closes the door behind her. She’s looking at him like that again, in that intense, coded way that makes him feel like someone pulled a stopper out of him and dumped all of his insides out on the ground.

“Did you see Saionji?” she asks.

“Peko, listen.”

He wants to do something. He wants to hold her hand. They’re right there, she’s not using them for anything, but he can’t just _do_ that. He holds his own hand out instead, only it’s stupid, like a handshake. It takes her a second to understand, her eyes bouncing between his palm and his face, but when she does, she meets him in the middle.

He can’t breathe anymore. “Do you want this?” he whispers. “Really- really want it.”

She frowns, brow knitting.

“This.” He hooks his fingers through hers, loose, one by one. “All of it. Us.” He swallows, but his throat is still dry. His voice is still a croak. “Me.”

She doesn’t hesitate. She doesn’t even think about her answer. She sets her other hand against his right cheek, thumb tracing the bottom edge of his scar, and all she says is, “Yes.”

He can believe her.

He _wants_ to believe her.

He wants to say _That’s good,_ or _I’m glad,_ or _Okay._ He opens his mouth, but only hears his own damp, shaking breath.

“Is everything alright?” she asks again.

He squeezes her hand, and focuses on her eyes. “Yeah,” he answers. “Yeah.”


End file.
